Aspirated air temperature sensor for a Polytunnel

In the UK air temperature is normally measured in a passively cooled Stevenson screen. The louvred design of the screen allows air to flow around the thermometer. The trouble with a polytunnel is there is no wind at all, as a result the sun heats the sensor up and without airflow you don’t know by how much.

By running a computer fan driven off a solar panel I can move enough air past the sensor to exchange the heated air from the sun shining on the sensor. For the sensor I use the standard Chinese supplied DS18B20 encapsulated in a stainless steel tube

The sensor is housed in a 6cm piece of white plastic waste pipe

The fan is mounted at the top of the pipe, designed to pull in air from below; this way the sensor is not heated by air passing the fan motor, and the airflow works with the natural tendency of warm air to rise. I’ve tried to keep the airflow as unimpeded as possible.

Looking at the results there is a difference of a few degrees

between the aspirated sensor and another sensor mounted on the outside of the plastic tube. They track at low temperatures but not when the sun is shining – the difference here is about 6 degrees, even in March, before the vernal equinox. It is remarkable just how much the air temperature swings – 27 degrees on a couple of days which still have hazy sun.

Weatherproofing the sensor is easier in a polytunnel because as well as the wind not blowing, it also doesn’t rain. I can use a cheaper indoor solar panel, the one I used is a 12V 1.5W unit, Maplin L58BF bought on sale for about £6, not the £20 they seem to be charging for it. even £6 is a little dear! I extracted the flashing blue LED and series diode to maximise the power available to the motor. This also charges the battery of the temperature sensor dual unit, which reports back to the collecting station using Ciseco’s XRF every 10 minutes.

The computer fan was a 12V brushless unit but I run it at about 7V, we’re not after blowing a gale through the tube. It will start at 5V. The Zener is there to limit overcharging of the 4.8V NiMH battery pack in the electronics to about 4mA. It only reports every 10mins so this is enough. The 1N4148 diode stops the battery discharging back through the fan and solar panel in the night. I should really measure what the leakage current of that Zener is 😉

I used a PIC 16F628A driving a Ciseco XRF to send the temperature data from two sensors back. Nowadays I would use the Ciseco RFu which includes an Arduino and low-power standby mods to make this cheaper.

Other implementations

This is a nice weatherproof design – I can’t work out if I missed a trick with using just one plastic tube rather than a coaxial design. Lots more ideas here.

Postscript (July 20 2015)

This rig works reasonably well; if power were available I’d run the fan all the time in daylight for a more rigorous result on summer cloudy days. The biggest problem in a polytunnel is that they are shockingly dusty places, and you have to sponge the dust of off the solar panel every month or so.