Viewbank Weather - Temporarily Unavailable !!!
The story of the demise of "Ben (Franklin)" the weather station
******* Update for 2nd March 2010 ********
Firstly, Thank you to those of you that have sent me emails lamenting the demise of "Ben Mk 1", it is always great to hear from people that get a benefit from my hobby, and to those people, your kind words and the benefit you get from my website makes it very worthwhile. So to Annie F (Ivanhoe), Megan K (Rosanna), Glenn and Sam B (Rosanna), Ruth (Montmorency), and Lindsay D (Templestowe), thanks for your kind words, and I hope you enjoy the new weather station.
The new weather station has been ordered and is "on it's way" from the USA, and should be here in the next few days. I have managed to "cobble together" a PC to perform the recording of the weather and website updates from various spare parts so that I can get the website running ASAP. I will also be creating a webpage documenting the installation of the new sensors and console so that you can see how the whole system fits together to provide the weather observations to the internet. At this stage, I am hoping to have the website updating again by the weekend of 13-14 March, although depending on when the station arrives, it may be sooner than that. If you want to keep updated, you can check the site from the 9th March - that is my "goal date" but I cannot promise this, as the new equipment is yet to arrive.
Again, thank you all for your kind, and well wishing, emails. It certainly makes it all worthwhile.
For those of you in the area that receive the "Heidelberg Leader" newspaper, keep an eye out next week - I may be featured in an article, and for those that are not in that area, I will publish a link to the article on this site once the paper "hits the letterboxes".
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During the afternoon of February 11th, 2010 a significant thunderstorm (and all of the associated chaos that comes with that!) decended on Melbourne. At approximately 4:20pm, a lightening strike grounded near our house, and caused a significant power surge.
This surge, while taking out the local power grid, also caused some damage to various electrical items in our house (and also those of our neighbours) which rendered them damaged or inoperable. The damage to our residence is as follows :- 2 x TV sets 1 x Digital Set-top Box receiver 1 x Central heather 1 x Air conditioner 1 x Internet Router 1 x Personal Computer (yep - the Weather Station!!) 1 x Weather Station ( !!!!) 1 x Solar Panel Inverter
While the damage is covered under insurance, restoring all of the items in the house is going to take some time, and for that reason, the weather station updates may not be restored for some time, as other issues (Central heater/Aircon comes to mind!!) may take a higher priority in the household.
For those that are interested, the power surge on the grid, send a massive power spike into the PC that records the weather data and produces the webpages. This, in turn, sent a significant amount of voltage through to the weather station via the data cable connection, and subsequently damaged the weather station beyond repair.
While I have been able to recover the historical data from the Weather Station PC, I am currently unable to record the current weather at our location, and as a result of this, am also unable to update the website with the current weather observations.
I know that there are several of you in my local community that are very loyal visitors to this site, and rely on it for accurate observations and predictions of the weather in the Rosanna/Viewbank/Yallambie/Heidelberg areas. To you I say "I will be back with newer, more accurate, and faster updating equipment". I am hoping to have the station back running "full steam" in the next 2-4 weeks, and hope that this disruption does not cause you too many issues.
Leading up to the storm, and during the early stages, the WebCam continued to record the approach of the storm. See below for the captured images at that time. Based on the logs, the final image was recorded a mere 20 seconds before the station was "fried like an egg!"
This image was taken approx. 20 minutes prior to the storm hitting our area - you can see the intense rainfall occurring to the far right of the image - and it is heading our way.
This image was taken approx. 15 minutes prior to the storm hitting our area - the rain cell is now heading DIRECTLY at us, and extremely heavy falls are predicted/expected.
This image was taken as the storm and associated rain began falling in our area.
The rain is now falling heavily and the station has just recorded the first 1mm of rainfall.
The rain is now very heavy, and the station has now recorded 6.6mm of rain - little did "Ben" (as in Franklin - my new nickname for my faithful, yet now departed, weather station) know that he only had another 2m 23 sec to live!!.
This is the final image taken by the weather station, and shows significant rainfall occurring. In 23 seconds, "Ben" will be struck by lightening and will "pass to the other side"! RIP - Ben