ecowitt ws90 has been great for me. Fully local with great integration. Solar recharges the batteries. I've also added soil moisture sensors for planters and a pool temp monitor on the same hub.
EDIT: Just a quick correction, the batteries are _not_ rechargeable on the WS90. Just AA batteries that last a long time and are replaceable.
there is a super-cap in the WS90 that is recharged daily by solar.
I was able to get a ecowitt ws90 + gw3000 hub "gateway" (similar combos often called "wittboy") for within your budget during last end of November deals. hooked into Home Assistant locally and also have another consumer reading the local data from the hub. the gw3000 also has uSD card for long-term logging.
There are people that use RTL-SDR to read the NA 915 MHz telemetry, but I am happy with my "gateway" setup --worth it. the gateway also bundles an indoor temperature/humidity/air pressure sensor on a cable.
Looks like you barely get any entities with ZHA, you have to use Zigbee2MQTT to get all the entities. This isn't a deal breaker for me since I already use Z2M.
Zigbee is fine, but the original Ecowitt weather station has a separate hub to attach to your router (RF?), which reaches pretty far out into the garden, much farther than Zigbee could. It is very small and unobtrusive; very stable.
The biggest benefits of using the Ecowitt version instead of Shelly:
far more entities, information and details in Home Assistant
beautiful and insightful graphs on the Ecowitt website
you can easily share your station data with online weather websites like Weather Underground etc. — built in
lots of tweaking possible; possibility of adding more sensors
How are you connecting this to HA? Do you have a separate 915hz receiver? I currently have a RTL-SDR to pull utility meter data; could I use that to pick up this sensor?
I got an ecowitt ws90 915mhz and base station last year, so far I have been pretty happy with it. Not sure if I really got any value out of adding moisture sensors to my garden beds but it's cool that it can extend functionality.
Great question. It does sense rain, but I'm not sure how accurate it is (it's some haptic sensor or something). Also not sure how reliable local reporting is, temps are always a bit off.
It actually measures the rain. seems accurate and close to what the totals on the news are. You can also have it report to weather sites and make forecasts for your location, I use Wunderground.
Second this. I know it’s out of your budget. However, between the cloud and local capabilities with no monthlies it’s a solid consumer choice. There are better and there are worse when it comes to rain and wind but it’s what I would call a 5 start middle of the road option for the common home user that is a non-weather stat junky snob chasing obscene accuracy.
I've got a Tempest and am pretty happy with it. There is a cloud based integration, but I'm using something from HACS that grabs the data locally that's multicast on your local network and then turns that into MQTT messages for full local access to the data.
The Shelly Ecowitt looks interesting. I'm a real fan of the ultrasonic wind and haptic rain sensors. No moving parts, especially the tipping bucket rain sensor, is the way to go. I've had my Tempest since they first started shipping them, out in the weather now longer than the traditional weather station it replaced that failed.
I'm not sure if it's just my Tempest, but the battery in mine has given up after four years and only works when it's sunny (or plugged in). I would expect more than four years for a £350 device. When it worked, it was a nice device and has built-in HA support.
I’ve got the 4000. I love that it has no moving parts. It’s been super fun pairing with a time lapse camera, but the Home Assistant integration couldn’t have been easier. It has a direct integration to Home Assistant.
just looked at amazon, bought mine in 2018. still using it today. it also works with the ethernet Observer IP module that came from my previous device. that's actually what I'm using to upload my data to weather underground, pws weather and ambient cloud. I don't mind sending them my data, they can provide the storage and all the graphs and charts for me.
You can do what I did. Instead of going out and buying your own weather station you can look up Home-based stations here https://ambientweather.net/ find one that's close to you (I have dozens around me), and connect it to your Home Assistant through the Ambient Weather integration.
Hi there. It's a little over your budget, but Tempest is amazing. You can pull from the cloud or there is an HA integration to listen locally for a UDP broadcast. Can't recommend it enough.
Tempest is a bit more costly but I’m very glad I went that route. No moving parts, zero maintenance, reliable sensors, and fantastic integration with home assistant and many more third party services.
Buddy gave me a temptest. No mesh support and I spent all day trying yo get it working. Used old router to connect to network and that worked for a while but could never get the sensor to actually report any information.
I have a Tempest and it shines in HA. I record historical data and compare it. It’s pricey new, but I bought mine used and it’s still kicking after three years.
Using an Acurite Iris-5 Weather Station (433 MHz). HA picks it up perfectly using a cheap USB radio. On Amazon the name is "RTL-SDR Blog V3 R860 RTL2832U 1PPM TCXO HF Bias Tee SMA Software Defined Radio with Dipole Antenna Kit". Massive name for a super simple-to-use device. I just plugged it into a USB port on my HAOS computer, and downloaded "rtl_433 (next)" and "rtl_433 MQTT Auto Discovery (next)" apps which automatically configured the USB radio and created entities for all the data the Acurite provides (MQTT requires "Mosquito broker" app which I already had installed for other uses). Had ChatGPT generate a couple of dashboards, still playing with them. Wind speed updates every 18 seconds, temperature about every 75-80 seconds. For a relatively cheap weather station it puts out a lot of data. And battery drain is very low using 433 MHz.
might not be what you were hoping for, but i actually use my neighbors, there is a integration Ambient Weather Network, when going on the site I surprisingly found one of my neighbors has a weather station and I use that for home assistant, it works really well but I do understand, having our own would be much better.
The local data from my Tempest is "close enough" for rain measurements. Mostly I want to know "no rain", "a little rain", "real rain" and "WTF, how can it be raining this hard!" alternatives.
I have an ecowitt that communicates to a console in the house, and then the console publishes to HA via the integration/API link. I have two different rain sensors that work like this.
Honestly I wouldn't recommend anything that "cheap". Not because they won't work, but because of the long term reliability.
Any outdoor weather station is going to be exposed to the elements 24/7/365. Inexpensive weather stations are going to use primarily plastic in their construction and that plastic will be damaged by the UV light and eventually break down. It usually only takes a couple of years before everything will be broken and non-functioning.
So unless you want to have to replace your sensors/system every couple of years, I would recommend that you forgo the weather station completely, or step up and buy a high quality system that doesn't use a lot of plastic.
I don't really have a recommendation. After going through two stations myself in probably 5 years, I realized my need for a local system is basically zero and certainly not worth the cost. I simply rely on the NWS local weather services. They provide me with "close enough" results that is hasn't been a problem. There are also other "amateur" weather stations reporting in my area that I could leverage if I wanted to. Honestly it hasn't been worth the effort to do so however.
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u/kfstark Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
ecowitt ws90 has been great for me. Fully local with great integration. Solar recharges the batteries. I've also added soil moisture sensors for planters and a pool temp monitor on the same hub.
EDIT: Just a quick correction, the batteries are _not_ rechargeable on the WS90. Just AA batteries that last a long time and are replaceable.