Customer Reviews

La Crosse Technology WS-8256U-AL Radio Controlled Digital Wall Clock with Weather Forecast

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

We received this as a Christmas gift and have come to depend

on it daily for time and weather. It displays accurate time,

temperature and weather "tendency" using rising or falling

pressure. It does not display actual pressure numbers, only

indicating rising or falling pressure. Outside temp. and pressure info is transmitted wirelessly from a small unit mounted outside and has a range of about 200 feet. Quality of the unit is good and I would recommend to anyone wanting to have an accurate time standard to which all clocks and watches could be set.

I placed the WS-8249U atomic clock that I bought couple months ago next to this one, and they both showed different indoor temperature and humidity. This one displayed lower humidity ( 47% vs 51%) and higher indoor temperature (80.4 vs 78.9)than the WS-8249U. I have no idea which one is more accurate. The out door temperature was displayed the same because they both received the same signal from the transmitter of the WS-8249U. The WS-8256u is smaller than i thought it was. I prefer the WS-8249U to the WS-8256u because it has nicer and larger display.

While the clock works quite well and resets as it should, the wireless outdoor thermometer is way off. I base this on two other wireless brands I own,an Acu-rite and a Oregon Scientific, along with the local NOAA weather broadcast, also WFIE TV. The Acu-rite temp=18.2 F, the Oregon Scientific+18.5 F,
and the NOAA broadcast temp @ 20:09 Jan28/07 = 18F, Local TV station WFIE-TV=18F. [...]

As I write this, The Weather Channel also reports it is 18 degrees F at 20:30.

The La Crosse WS-8256U-AL reports it is 23.5 F, more than 5 degrees off. In my opinion,a clock/thermometer costing this much should be dead on.
Buy it for the time, NOT the temperature.

This is an amazing clock. I love that it's atomic, so no need in adjusting the time. The weather forecast is great to know what the temperature is outside as well! I'm thinking of purchasing another one of my other rooms!

The WS-8256 Weather Station is great. Large numbers and accurate. The Atomic Clock auto update works well but you have to remember that it doesn't update immediately. It updates between 1 AM and 6 AM while you're sleeping. Don't expect it to be immediate, right out of the box. It also takes a couple hours for the outside remote to produce it's first accurate readings and a day or so for the weather predictor to give an accurate weather prediction. It needs to accumulate a trend of data to be reliable. Then it's better than the TV weatherman, but isn't anything !!!

The clock is very accurate, the inside digital thermometer is accurate within 1 degree. The outside digital thermometer varies 3-5 degrees from
the mercury thermometer we have outside. The clock is attractive and the numbers easy to read.

I was given this as a gift and liked it so much I bought one for my parents.
I love the big clock numbers, you can see them from a long way off, and of course it's always accurate. It's the one clock in our house that I'm sure always has the right time.
At first I thought having the indoor humidity was odd, I would have thought that the outdoor humidity would have made more sense. But then I found out how important indoor humidity was, that it affected our allergies and we didn't even know! That's been very helpful.
I would have liked it to have an actual barometric pressure reading instead of the little up and down arrows and sun/cloud/rain symbols, but that's a minor objection, overall I love this clock!
The only real issue is that with both clocks we've had trouble getting the outside temperature to show on the clock. To fix it you have to remove all the batteries of both the inside and outside devices - at the same time - and then wait 15 minutes to replace them. And then wait another 15 minutes to see if the temperature will show. I had to do that multiple times with each clock to get them working. And each time you remove the batteries you have to go through the whole set up procedure. Which isn't hard, just tedious.
But once that's done it works great!

I just got it, but everything seems to be working fine and correctly. The numbers are very readable. 4 Stars because I could not imagine that at that level of "gadgetness" it could not be changed to display degrees celcius. Bummer, my mistake.

I am just in love with the idea of a clock that you never have to set yourself. Moving from traditional to digital is nice, as are the thermometers and other meteorological whatsits that are all built in. Really, if you want the clock simply for the automatic synchronization, this is going to be the one for you. There are just a couple of things to think about.

Firstly, I don't like that the screen is too small to add a "military time" setting... there isn't room for zeros or twos in the first digit. This is minor, as most of us won't be using this as an alarm and accidentally setting it for the wrong end of the day, but I'm sure some of us are used to reading military time.

Another negative is that the thermometers don't appear entirely trustworthy. Close, sure, but when you see it bounce up and down several degrees on the indoor temperature several times in the span of a minute, you know it isn't recording and displaying flawlessly.

And the last negative is that the synchronizer fails often. I'm less than 1200 miles from Fort Collins, in an location with good radio reception, and it still takes a few hours to get the signal when I put batteries in it. It does work, but I'd wonder about people who don't get clear signals or live farther from the source.

All in all, there's nothing really to be too concerned about. The clock works better than the one it's replacing, I'm sure. And all you'll ever have to do is change the batteries.

This is a fine and reliable instrument with quality components and one that works quite nicely. The atomic clock routinely receives timing radio signals from Boulder, CO government transmitters (within a range of some 1500 miles). Indoor relative humidity and temperature as well as outdoor temperature and extremely precise atomic clock time with the day and date as well as the relative barometric tendency (rising/falling) are all displayed continuously. In addition a weather forecast based on much of this information is also continuously displayed (sunny/fair/clear, precipitation, cloudy, etc.) which of course must be taken with several grains of salt since it is based upon very simple measurements and very simplistic rules for prediction.

Precise temperature measurement outdoors requires a meteorological weather box to properly separate out the direct solar radiation effect from the real ambient temperature of air in motion. Unless you try to produce such a situation, do not expect that the two temperature sensors (one indoors and one outdoors) will always be in close agreement. The instrument will give a relative idea of how much different the indoor and outdoor temperatures are however depending on the time of day, sun angle, degree of cloudiness, if the outdoor sensor is located near another source of heat, etc.

I am very glad that we purchased this unit and at $25 it is a great value for what you get.