The Best Home Weather Stations

Eight years after the release of its first product, France’s Netatmo is by now a veteran in smart weather security. What’s surprising is that the Netatmo Smart Home Weather Station (Rating: 7/10, WIRED Recommends) has not changed considerably since its launch—and especially little since our last review of it in 2015.

The basic concept remains the same: You place a slim aluminum sensor inside, near your router, and another skinny tube outside. (It hangs easily from a screw or nail.) The outdoor sensor talks to the indoor sensor, which relays everything to the web and the Netatmo app. You can add additional indoor sensors ($60 each) if you want to get the temperature in other parts of the house, along with the recent additions of an anemometer wind gauge ($110) and a rain gauge ($80), all of which are sold a la carte. A full complement of gear including both gauges will run you $330, providing measurements of indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, barometric pressure and—uniquely—indoor CO2 levels and sound levels, plus wind speed and rain via the new sensor add-ons.

Netatmo’s app is what makes it one of the best products in this space. It’s intuitive and easy to read, and it collects data forever. Want to see a graph of daily high and low temperatures over the last month? It’s easy to zoom in and out of the data to pinpoint exactly what interests you. Until I replaced my old Netatmo system with a new one for this review, I had access to years’ worth of data all in one place. Netatmo’s temperature gauge is quite accurate, but unfortunately its forecasts aren’t the best, with an average variance of 4.8 degrees. However, sometimes Netatmo really nails it when other units whiff: It was the only unit in the roundup to accurately predict a freak warm day in the middle of the test period.

Where Netatmo fails primarily is in installation. The setup process is convoluted and buggy, and it seems to have gotten worse over the years instead of better. Netatmo’s piecemeal approach also means you have to install each component individually, a complex process that involves strategically pressing buttons and removing/reinstalling batteries at just the right time. This process was even more complex because the sensors Netatmo sent me came with preinstalled batteries, all of which were dead on arrival, and the batteries in the wind meter were actually corroded. The system also has a tendency to randomly lose its Wi-Fi connection without warning, only to recover it a few hours later.

When Netatmo is working, it’s a dream. And perhaps its best feature is its discreet hardware, which can be hidden just about anywhere. Despite some issues, it’s still my top pick in this category, if by a small margin.

The Tempest (Rating: 6/10) is a recent entry to the scene, and like Netatmo it aims to give you a lot of information with a limited footprint. Though the hardware is larger than Netatmo’s, it’s more discreet than AcuRite and Ambient’s, looking a bit like a bird feeder and intended to be mounted on a pole (not included) somewhere in your yard or on your roof. The system also requires an indoor module that relays data from the sensor to your Wi-Fi network, but that module doesn’t provide any indoor climate information. Setup is fairly painless, at least in comparison to most other weather stations on the market.

Tempest provides quite a bit of information, including temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed/direction, lighting strike info, and UV data. The system also measures rain activity, but it does so without a traditional rain-catching funnel. Instead, Tempest uses a haptic rain sensor, essentially measuring when and how forcefully water droplets hit the top of the device. It’s surprisingly accurate and a lot less messy than the typical rain sensor—and it doesn’t have to be cleaned periodically.

Tempest’s temperature readings tend to run a little high, and its weather forecasts were the worst in this roundup, missing on average by 5.2 degrees. Tempest’s forecasts tend to be pretty wild, including one that guessed the high would be 9 degrees lower than Netatmo and another that forecast a 30 percent chance of “wintry mix” precipitation on a day when there was no rain and we had a 40-degree low. That’s odd because forecasting is supposed to be Tempest’s forte, using machine learning to “significantly improve the forecast over time,” per the company. I’ve been testing the device for several months and still see some pretty out-there predictions on otherwise unremarkable days.

My other complaint with Tempest is that its app isn’t as useful as it could be. The real-time and forecast views on the main page are intuitive, but if you want to delve into history, you are presented only with a numeric data sheet of each day’s weather. Recent improvements now let you see a digest of the weather by week, month, or year, and this information is now also available graphically, albeit in an entirely different part of the app.

Overall, I do like Tempest despite its faults, namely because of the hardware, but $329 is asking an awful lot for the kit. With an updated app and some fine-tuning to the AI, I may be inclined to revise my rating upward down the line.