Hot Weather (Part 2)
In the Hot Weather blog entry, I mentioned that the temperature at my desk rarely reaches 31 degrees C (87.8 degrees F). Today was probably the hottest day so far this summer, and my desk thermometer peaked at 32.2 degrees C (89.96 degrees F), with 75% humidity, resulting in a heat index of over 43 degrees C (109 degrees F)!
A post in /r/japanlife titled “It’s really hot today - a little lesson on wet bulb temperature” includes a link to a government website that publishes and forecasts wet-bulb temperature (WBT). Nice! The wet-bulb temperature at the closest measurement to where I live peaked at 34.4 degrees C. Really!?!? That is high enough to make the highest recorded wet-bulb temperatures list on Wikipedia…
Despite the higher temperature, I was fine working without air conditioning today. My family (in a different room) did without air conditioning as well. We made due with fans and cold drinks. Perhaps this is good training for my kids, since many predict hotter weather in the future due to global warming.
On a related note, I would like to purchase a new thermometer/hygrometer that shows the low and high values for both temperature and humidity in addition to the current values. Searching Amazon, the best match for my requirements is a device from an unknown company, with no reviews. There are many low quality products on Amazon, and the price is high enough that I am not going to take the risk of purchasing one. Though it is not exactly what I want, I think I will purchase a Tanita TT-580 that will at least let me see a graph of recent temperature and humidity measurements.
I would really like to take periodic measurements and store them in my computer, allowing me to perform calculations and make visualizations however I want. I do not want to significantly increase my power usage, however. I plan on building a new router soon, though, and the board that I will use has GPIO pins! Perhaps I can find time to connect temperature and humidity sensors to the router, which will always be on, and write a script to periodically take and store measurements.