Updated January 1, 2024

If you walk in our gardens along the creek behind Waterside North you may notice my weather station. I acquired my Ecowitt GW1101 on Amazon in August 2022. After a chat with my consulting engineer, Keith, and a visit to Bunnings it was installed using plumbing pipe embedded in a plant pot filled with gravel. The tiny solar panel has powered it flawlessly every since.

I named my weather station Boobegan Creek Witt and it provides very accurate readings of temperature, humidity and rainfall. While it does have wind strength and direction sensors these are affected by the surrounding bushes and only give approximate readings.

Now on New Year’s Day I have the first full year of readings which may be of interest. As an aside at the time of writing this we have had a very rainy New Year’s Eve and in the last 24 hours 142 mm of rain has fallen and it is still raining.

First is the chart for temperatures in 2023.

The maximum temperature of 37.6 degrees occurred only recently on 28 December with the feels like temperature even higher. Note the next highest temperature was 37.1 degrees on 13 February. We had a really low minimum temperature of 5.7 degrees on 20 June. The average temperature over the 12 months was 20.3 degrees.

This is the 12-month rainfall chart.

We had 1072 mm of rain over the year. The wettest month was November with 223 mm of rain.

One of the impressive features of the Ecowitt software is the ability to join your weather station to their community weather network is you wish. This allows you to see all other weather stations all over the world with their readings added to a map.

This is an example of the current temperature map for our region.

You can click on the location of any of the stations to see the current reading. I often compare my station with the one on the southern side of the Clear Island Waters lake and we are often within a degree of each other.

Just before I started writing this I captures the map for rainfall and you will see big differences in the readings to show how localised this stormy rainfall can be. Boobegan Creek happens to be one of the highest readings.

An added bonus of this device is the indoor sensor attached to the little controller that connects the weather station to the internet via Wi-Fi. The indoor temperature readings show a minimum of 17.6 degrees on 21 June and a maximum of 29 degrees on 20 December when I was on the Great Southern heading for Adelaide and no aircon was operating. My excellent aircon kept the average temperature to 23.1 degrees and 62% humidity over the year.

Being internet-connected I can check the current readings and charts on my mobile wherever I happen to be. This allowed me to see the more than 100 mm rain that fell overnight on Christmas Day even though Marian and I were living it up in Adelaide. For a very reasonable outlay this Chinese-made device continues to operate without fault and I highly recommend it.

Michael Rees

Tricare Cypress Gardens Retirement Community