Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

You're looking at the 2018+ flagship of weather stations. I'm coming from an AcuRite system most recently. I liked that system, but let's just say that company is quite obviously failing and their customer support is nearly non-existent. I wanted out. I was looking for a replacement, with my top priority being a system that could track and alert temperatures from multiple locations. I did a ton of research and ended up settling on this WS-2000 from Ambient Weather. I didn't order it from Amazon, but rather directly from Ambient Weather, since Amazon would not ship this unit to Alaska. For me, tracking temperature is more of a necessary evil than a hobby. I live in the sub-arctic and I have to know if something is awry at my house. If heat goes out in the dead of winter, I maybe have a few hours to respond or I'm facing a $30K+ bill to replace plumbing. So, monitoring & alerting is my #1 priority in a weather/temperature station, all other features are secondary. On the plus side, though, this also gives me an opportunity to test gear in a place that is, at times, colder than the surface of Mars. So, if it works for me - it should work for you. What drew me to this station was the ability to have comprehensive outdoor monitoring, plus 8 optional temperature gauges. The well-known "best value" WS-2902 wasn't going to work since it only had simple two-zone indoor/outdoor tracking and alerting. After much research, I found this recently introduced unit is essentially the same outdoor station as the WS-2902, but with an updated full color LCD display and additional capabilities. Most notably, multiple sensor capabilities. There was virtually no community feedback at the time of my purchase, so I made my decision entirely on Ambient Weather having an active community forum and generally well-received product feedback on the WS-2902. I've been overall quite happy with the system. Installation was pretty straight forward and it wasn't difficult to set up the system. The documentation provided is fairly thorough, far better than my previous station. The outdoor unit came with everything needed to mount the outdoor unit to a 1" or 2" pole. In total, the display station supports 10 sensors - the outdoor sensor, the included WH-32 sensor and 8 optional WH-31 sensors. The optional WH-31 sensors were reasonably inexpensive, which I was glad to see as that made it easier for me to switch. These optional sensors have 8 communication channels that are set by dip switches. You want to prevent channel overlap, and the dip settings are described in the manual. To my knowledge, this is the first consumer grade full color LCD base station I've seen on the market. This adds a whole user interface component that is a reasonably new concept to these weather stations. I can tell that the software was fairly well thought out and the presentation of data is very good. I love seeing sunset/sunrise times, the moon cycle, sun cycle, solar strength data and of course all the sensor data. When you have multiple WH-31 sensors, you can set it to cycle through them or just show one of them statically. The display is nice and true full color, but I hope that future software updates take more advantage of this by providing different "skins" to fit moods/seasons/decor/etc. I love that I can provide custom names for my sensors and have it show on the display, no guessing on what is what. The unit's navigation won't win any awards, but it's easy enough to get around and program the unit. I really wish the unit had a web page or app for configuration, though, as it was a bit tedious to input sensor names and such. Technically, this unit departs from the separate "base station" plus "internet gateway" concept used by most products in the past. The display station simply connects to your Wifi and the sensors communicate with the display station over the 900MHz band. Although I haven't dug into the electrical nuts and bolts yet, some technical probes indicate the hardware is similar to an Arduino ESP series, based on an ESP series integrated WiFi chip. I have my outdoor unit about 60 feet from my house and the signal easily penetrates a cedar sided, heavily insulated wall. You generally want some distance between any buildings and the outdoor station to improve wind data and prevent heat absorption from affecting temperature data. I have the included & WH-31 sensors distributed in key areas that I want to monitor around the house. The most difficult sensor locations for me are in my outdoor deep freeze and laundry area, both of which have multiple obstacles/walls in the way of the base station, and these both work great. The manual states about 100 feet is the most you can get in the real world, this seems fairly accurate to me. Do note that if you have metal siding on your home or business, you will likely have problems. I was mostly interested in Ambient Weather's native web solution (AmbientWeather.net) for the alerting capabilities they provide. This was easy to get going, just sign up for an account and give the website your unit's MAC address. Site navigation is decent and modern, pretty much everything I wanted was easy to find. For fun, I did set up a Wunderground PWS and this was also really easy, just be sure to mind your station ID as it is case sensitive. It's been nice to share our back yard's weather with family not in Alaska. The update interval appears to be 16 seconds for Wunderground and 60 seconds for Ambient Weather. Also, you can use either site, or both. Ambient Weather has done an excellent job at resolving issues with updated firmware. One issue I had early on was low battery indications. This is now detectable, to the sensor, and can be alerted on allowing proactive battery replacement. Also, all the early adopter bugs have been largely cleared up with these updates. They've added additional functionality as well. I've been very pleased with their willingness to address community concerns. All of my issues, aside from one, have been resolved by the company. My only remaining desire is the native ability to send alerts to multiple people and maybe via both SMS and email for each alert. It's critical to me that my other half receives house-threatening alerts. I sometimes travel around Alaska and often have no cell network when visiting Alaskan villages, so having two+ alert destinations/methods is vitally important to me. The AcuRite system I came from did have this, but I'm done with those guys. In a long term ownership update of this review, I would also add that this station has been turned into a situational awareness powerhouse for my home. Ambient Weather has added soil moisture sensors, leak sensors, indoor and outdoor PM2.5 sensors and probably others as I write this update. I haven't used all these sensors, so I can't comment on all of them, but I would say this unit has become one of the most vital tools I have regarding the situational awareness of my home. I will admit that I have not played with the Google Home or Amazon Alexa functions at all. I don't have/want these devices in my home and I'm perfectly happy either checking the display, app or websites for information. I do have an interest in possibly developing a way to automate garden watering using rainfall and temperature data, and this unit appears to support this concept in multiple ways. I might also look into automating electric heaters in my crawl space near critical plumbing, which could buy me time to respond to a primary heating failure. I think it's great that this unit is open to developing unique ways to work with the information it creates. As for winter performance, the outdoor unit has survived multiple tough Alaska winters and I couldn't be more pleased. Sustained negative temperatures for months with lows to -38 have been no problem. The unit has had tons of snow dumped on it and all I had to do was brush it off each snowfall. Also, I was concerned about the solar collector's performance as I only get about one hour of available sunlight in the depth of winter. There were also quite a few occasions where I didn't even bother to brush off snow from the solar panel, so the unit's power management has performed well beyond expectations. The unit generally survives the entire winter on one set of Eneloop AA rechargeable batteries. (I know the Eneloops to have fantastic cold weather performance, and that was no different in this unit.) Regardless, I do change the batteries out once or twice a year proactively, but I was super pleased to get an entire winter on one set. Ambient Weather has been continually improving the firmware for the unit and are also in the process of adding additional sensors. There is a 2.5PM sensor now available and I've also heard they are working on soil moisture sensors. I think this is great and it shows that they are invested into making a great product. They take customer feedback seriously, although I'd still like to see them address my issues with multiple alerts (without having to use IFTTT) and custom alert text. If I run into further troubles or if Ambient Weather resolves some of my concerns, I will be sure to update this review. If they do, I will certainly upgrade my review to a full five stars as I think this unit deserves it.