Netatmo Weather Station is long on looks — and longer on data

It was time to update my home weather station from something functional but ugly to something decidedly more modern. Netatmo fits that bill nicely. It even has a Windows phone app.

By Phil Nickinson
published

I was going to show you my old weather station, a venerable beast from Oregon Scientific that is quite good at this sort of thing. But alas, as soon as I took it off the wall it disappeared to wherever Phil's Old Stuff disappears. (It was basically an older, less sexy version of this (opens in new tab).

So. Time for something new, something connected, and something definitely more modern.

A quick search of ye olde internet consistently returned offerings from Netatmo. The company's products haven't changed a lot over the years, which actually is a good thing in this case. So that's the direction my credit card was pointed.

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Thoughts on Netatmo Weather Station

The basics: The standard Netatmo Weather Station comes with a relatively small indoor sensor and an outdoor sensor. They look, well, like silver cans. The indoor one measures temperature and humidity, and sound level and carbon dioxide levels. The outdoor sensor does temperature, pressure and humidity. They connect to your smartphone, and connect to each other. Note that there's no external display here — you have to use a phone or tablet or computer or something to actually get data.

There are two additional modules that can be connected — a rain gauge, which I grabbed because Florida, and a wind gauge, which I didn't get because I don't that much about how breezy it is.

Setup was as simple as you'd expect for this sort of thing — you just follow the instructions in the app. I've used it with Android (opens in new tab) and on iOS (opens in new tab) — but there's also a Windows phone app (opens in new tab), as well. The web interface may be my favorite of the bunch, actually, because it's full of features and nicely designed. Finally, I settled on the third-party app Baratmo (opens in new tab) for my Mac menu bar.

So now I have access to all my weather information — inside and out. I can get to it from anywhere and in more detail than what even my $250 Nest thermostat provides. (By the way: Netatmo is a "Works with Nest" device, but you can tie it in via third-party services like IFTTT.)

What's missing? Not a whole lot. But I do miss having a single place at home where I can see all this info at one time. As much as I loathed that aging LCD display, it did its job without complaint. So I'm hoping someone builds a "skill" for it to work with the upcoming Amazon Echo Show. And I'd like a little more historical data — how much rain did I get in the last week versus just the last day, for example.

Strictly from a data standpoint, this has been a good purchase.

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Phil Nickinson
Phil Nickinson

Phil is the father of two beautiful girls and is the Dad behind Modern Dad. Before that he spent seven years at the helm of Android Central. Before that he spent a decade in a newsroom of a two-time Pulitzer Prize-finalist newspaper. Before that — well, we don't talk much about those days. Subscribe to the Modern Dad newsletter!

5 Comments
  • I've had the Netatmo Weather Station for a year or so. Works great. However, the battery in the outdoor module has started to die after ca. 1 month... I don't know if this is because I live in a colder climate, or if I used a poor battery... Rain module... doesn't work in the winter season for regions with snow... It would be nice to se a module that can also handle snow.
  • Hmmmm. Will keep an eye on the battery life. ... Good question on snow, too. Not something I encounter regularly. ... Do other weather systems have gauges for that?
  • I have an Netatmo Weather Station since 14 months. With 3 extra indoor modules & the rain gauge. It works fine so far. I have also bought the Windows/WindowsPhone MeteoStation app & I have also linked the Netatmo account to IFTTT. I'm satisfied. The battery drain problem some outdoor modules have are a h/w fault. Read more here:
    http://forum.netatmo.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4868
  • If the indoor unit had a built-in display I'd buy it. It's too bad these are exclusively app-reliant. I'll have to stick with our LaCrosse weather monitors until I find a better "smart" solution.
  • Did you check the accuracy of the temperature readings? I bought one of these for my dad, and he liked it, except the indoor temperature was always incorrect by more than 1C, and the outdoor unit used one set of batteries per week after the initial set had run out.  He contacted Netatmo and their support was very slow, unhelpful and either rude or gallic, depending on your point of view.  After a couple of weeks of waiting for basic responses, he was told to send it to them to be examined at his cost.  He refused to pay for the shipping to France and threw away the entire setup. TOTAL FAIL.