Customer Reviews

Oregon Scientific RGR126 Cable Free Long Range Rain Gauge

5 star:		(52)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

The setup was easy and the gauge/remote temperature sensors worked well (initially, anyway!). The display unit is attractive and doesn't take up a lot of space. HOWEVER, after just a few months, the LCD display for the rainfall information faded until it was unreadable. Then, the base unit began to fail to communicate with the rain sensor, followed shortly by a failure to communicate with the temperature sensor. All troubleshooting steps were followed and all failed.

Upon calling for warranty service, I was told to send the unit back and that Oregon Scientific would simply mail me a new one - right answer! However, that was in early October. It is now nearly the end of January, and no unit. I called to follow up and was told that they were out of stock and had NO IDEA when they might be shipping the replacement unit, and that there was no other type of unit that could be substituted. I asked that my request be escalated but there has been no response.

This is pitiful customer service. Do not purchase any Oregon Scientific product expecting that they will honor their warranty.

***UPDATE 2/8/2007***
I checked the Oregon Scientific website and discovered that one can buy a new unit for immediate delivery. Called customer service (again) and was told that the sales and warranty divisions have separate inventory and that the inventory for the warranty division is still on backorder. And they have no idea when the units will come in. And NO! we cannot get you a replacement from our sales division, even if you have been waiting for FOUR MONTHS. I asked that the call be escalated and was able only to leave a voice mail with a supervisor.

***UPDATE 2/18/2007***
Still no replacement. The customer service supervisor did not return my call. I have now sent a letter via snail mail to the president of the company asking that they fulfill their warranty commitment.

***UPDATE 3/1/2007***
At long last I have a replacement unit. I received follow-up calls from both the corporate and the customer service offices. I guess the keys to getting action from this company are persistence and taking your complaint to the top. It's too bad to have to go to such lengths for a simple product replacement.

***UPDATE 6/13/2008
The outdoor temperature sensor has failed and no longer transmits to the base station. The rain gauge is still working.

Received the unit and was impressed by the rain gauge construction. Included are screens to keep the spiders out of the base, a recurring problem with the LaCrosse unit (they'd bridge the teeter with web and prevent it from moving). The batteries are a bit of a pain to replace in the gauge since there are several very small screws that must be removed to get into the battery/electronics housing.

That said, the display unit stopped working within two days. The temperatures were reading -160 on the outdoor unit and the indoor was reporting 40 below zero, that combined with several LCD segments ghosting when they should clearly have been off necessitated a return of the unit to Oregon Scientific. Haven't gotten the unit back yet so I may have to write another report about poor warranty/repair service....we'll see. Customer support had hired folks off the street whose only response to any reported problem was to remove all the batteries and do a reset of all units. When you tell them that you have already done all due diligenge in this regard the customer support tech insists that you do it again. Not impressed.

Followed the set up instructions before permanently mounting rain gauge outside. All seemed well. Fabricated a level mount outside several weeks later and found that base station could no longer acquire signal from the gauge. Went through the battery change/reset ritual that tech support recommended. No change. No signal. Tech support issued RMA with a two to three week turn-around estimate. Oregon Scientific tech support not a value-added service.

I was very leery after reading the reviews here, but encouraged that it could be calibrated. I admit the batteries are ridiculous, requiring the removal of ten tiny screws (they should at least include a small screwdriver in the package; but really it needs to be redesigned) so I'm taking off one star for that. However everything else works pretty well. I have some Oregon Scientific indoor/outdoor thermometers so I didn't have much trouble setting the thing up.

I followed the instructions someone posted here about determining whether the gauge is accurate. I tried pouring water and it seemed to undercount the rain (one inch of "rain" measured 0.9 inches), probably because I was pouring too fast. A better way for me was to put the gauge under a slowly dripping faucet and let it dump its water into a bowl underneath. Once it measured 1 inch, I measured the water in the bowl and it came out to 200 milliliters just like it was supposed to. Using the same method with the dripping faucet I counted about 20 drops to tilt each bucket so I feel like it is pretty well balanced. Maybe I just got a good one, but it seems to work as advertised so far. I live in Georgia so we don't get actual rain, but I will update the review if I have problems.

Update after two weeks: It has rained a couple of times and the gauge seems to work just fine and I like the 9-day memory and cumulative total (0.43 inches today and 0.87 inches in two weeks). Also I set up another gauge for a friend with similar results.

Update after 18 months: This gauge and the other one at my friend's house are both still working fine. Light rains aren't enough to trigger the 0.04 in (1 mm) bucket, but otherwise it seems to be in the same neighborhood as news reports of rainfall.

After my initial experience with the RGR 126 rain gauge I recommend owners at least check the calibration/accuracy before assuming it is providing accurate measurements. I noticed a significant differance between my old "manual" tube style rain gauge & the RGR 126 after several recent rains which led me to suspect the wireless unit was inaccurate. Using Oregon Scientific's calibration/accuracy instructions I found my new wireless rain gauge was indicating .76" of rain for each actual inch of rainfall. I couldn't give up on the wireless rain gauge though as I do believe Oregon Scientific is a quality conscious company. So, I went in search of an RGR126 FAQ sheet since the product manual doesn't explain how to correct inaccuracies. Finding Oregon Scientific's FAQ sheet isn't that easy though. You can search it yourself or use www2.oregonscientific.com/service/faq.asp?faq=136 to link to it. In short you can check the accuracy of your RGR 126 and better yet you can correct any inaccuracies. Once the outdoor unit is mounted to a level surface you should "drizzle" 200 ml of water into the collection funnel. 200 ml of water drizzled into the outdoor unit equals one inch of rainfall recorded on the indoor display, according to Oregon Scientific. You can do this! Typical kitchen measuring cups provide 50 to 100 "ml" measurements and most of us own a kitchen measuring cup. It is important to drizzle the 200 ml of water into the remote unit funnel though. Pouring the water in will flood the measuring buckets resulting in subsequent inaccuracies. Instructions for recalibrating and accuracy are provided at the above link. Would I recommend this product to a friend? Yes, yes & no. Yes to those who just want a number; any number. Yes to those that want rainfall accuracy & "if necessary" are willing to spend some time re-calibrating the outdoor unit. No to those unwilling to take a chance on purchasing anything less than 99.9% accuracy and unwilling or unable to calibrate the outdoor unit "if needed". I'm probably one person in a thousand that received an inaccurate RGR126, but the good news is that yours can be re-calibrated should yours need it.

I received the Oregon Scientific RGR126 wireless rain gauge as part of a weather watchers program at my local TV station. I was looking forward to having a fairly low-fuss, easy to use station to collect weather data, considering that I don't have a lot of time to commit to tweaking it every day.

I opened the package and read through the very meager user manual. I'd like to think that as a scientist, I could get a consumer-level station up and running easily. So I went about unscrewing the many tiny, unnecessary screws and inserted the batteries. The base station turned on, and received absolutely no signal from the rain gauge, even though they were right next to each other on the table. The temperature sensor was communicating, but it showed that the inside and outside temperatures were exactly the same-- a highly unlikely situation since the A/C was on. I came to Amazon, which is coincidentally the only place to get good info online. I tried the simultaneous reset multiple times, and cursed the fact that the thermo sensor reset was UNDERNEATH the screwed-down back panel. After at least five hours of effort, I was only unable to reliably get the indoor temperature correct. The rain gauge was nowhere to be seen, and the outdoor temperature had blanked out into "---".

The following afternoon I decided to give it another go. After another simultaneous reset, the outdoor and indoor temperature were different values. However, I had to open the window and place the unit in the sill to get it to work. I left it there and went to work on the rain gauge. After pressing the signal search key on the base station, it finally located the signal about 10 minutes later. To test the sensor function, I got a cup full of water, a paper towel, and dribbled water into the unit. The manual states that the rain gauge sends data every 98 seconds; my unit, I guess, was not aware of this requirement. I kept dribbling water in, becoming more irritated and impatient. Finally the level inside tipped, and a minute later a reading appeared. Of course, by this point I have no trust in the unit, so I repeat the process. I realized that it only gave a reading after the balance tipped. I picked it up, rocked it slowly from left to right. Sure enough, the reading goes up. The rain gauge only transmitted a change when the balance in the unit tipped from the weight of the water collected. I'm not sure how it would work in the field, but how does it measure very small amounts of rainfall? There's no way to zero the rainfall completely, short of resetting the machine, so how would I be sure that the total on the base station isn't over the course of a few days?

Right now I've had it for just over 24 hours, and I can't wait to buy my own and send this one back. I think this product is very well priced for the consumer who wants to know more about weather than just what's on the newscast. But it's been a fairly frustration experience with a poorly designed product, and it has the potential of putting novices off the idea of weather watching completely.

If you want a weather station, don't get this one. Spend a bit more money if you can, and be sure to do extensive research. I give this unit a D-. It at least gets the indoor temperature right.

We have had this model since it came on the market about five or six years ago. You have to change the battery about every 14 months or so, and you have to clean out any mold or gunk that had collected in the measuring cups inside the outer units. I do this when I change the batteries. During its life with us, it has been knocked down once by a errant football and once when a tree fell on it. The first time it fell, the outside unit housing was cracked and has been glued together. Still works great. On the second mishap it was washed away in a drainage ditch. We found it over a week later, under water. We dried out the electronics and it worked fine.
The first couple of rain gauges we had before this one were similar to toys even though they cost as much as this one. If and when this one does die, or is broken beyond repair, we will replace with the same brand and model.

this rain gauge was clearly engineered rather than slapped together like the lacrosse gauge i had before. the history only goes back 9 days, but it actually works. the instructions require a bit of patience, but if you follow the pictures rather than the text it's quite easy to set up.
it has worked flawlessly and really is built impressively.

Thus far, I'm well pleased with the product. The feature that 'sold' me was that the Oregon Scientific RGR126 was the only wireless rain gauge (that could find)that didn't require a direct line of sight between the collection & receiving devices.

MY INITIAL THOUGHTS - READ THE UPDATE BELOW! The rain gauge reads 1" when I drizzle 200 ml of water into the unit. I tried it three times and got a maximum spread of 0.06". After a heavy downpour, the gauge registered substantially the same as my neighbor's "old school" tube gauge. Not too shabby in my opinion, seeing how I was wondering more about did we get an inch of rain or an inch and a half, not was it 1.04" or 1.08". Let's get real. One complaint I've seen repeated here is that getting to the batteries is a real pain because of all the tiny screws. That complaint must have reached the design team, as the unit I received has only two screws. Another complaint I've seen is that the indoor and outdoor temperature readings don't match when the outdoor sensor is placed beside the indoor unit. My answer to that is be patient. When I unpacked the unit, the outdoor and indoor readings differed by 5 degrees and were both 10 degrees away from the actual indoor temperature. I put the outdoor sensor and base unit next to each other and within a couple of feet of my thermostat and left them alone. Within a couple of hours they were within 0.1 degree of each other and within 0.5 degree of the thermostat (only reads to the nearest degree). Again, not to shabby in my opinion, as I'm not looking to see if it's 75.1 or 75.2 degrees outdoors or in. Mount the rain gauge level and in the open; mount the temperature sensor in the closest thing to deep shade you can muster and you'll be fine. To those that will never be satisfied with any consumer grade rain gauge or remote thermometer, I suggest you take a ride to your local National Weather Service station and ask them for the model numbers of the equipment they use. $47,000 later you will know if you had 0.01" or 0.02" and if it's 75.1 or 75.2 degrees out, if you're able to focus long enough to set it up properly.

UPDATE January 2012 - The outdoor temperature gauge reads fine in between about 65 and 80 degrees, other than that it is junk. The local news channel reports 18 degrees and it says 29; the local report is 104 degrees and it says 96. No, it's not in the sun at any time of the year, and where the sun don't shine is where it belongs. The rain gauge (the reason I purchased this product) worked fine for about a year and then died. Nothing I can do will bring it back. I cannot recommend this product.