Finally took the plunge and purchased this. Researched online and in forums for about 2 months and decided on this model. The instructions included are very vague and leave out alot of information. I really don’t like calling tech support so with the assistance of forums and some tedious trial/error the system is up and running perfectly. You should be comfortable changing a few settings on your router, if your not comfortable doing that, find someone who is or just go ahead and save yourself plenty of frustration and return this product while you have time. Before you do anything else: do this. Login to your router. Most routers now, dual broadcast 2.5ghz and 5ghz networks. Often, your wifi network names will be identical for both. This is where the problem is, when going through the wizard to connect your 5-1 iris, there is no way to tell the 5gz apart from the 2.5ghz network. The sensor is designed to ONLY work on the 2.5 ghz network. Go in the settings and disable the 5ghz network. This way when you go to connect your iris 5 and 1 sensor, it’s only seeing the 2.5ghz network. This is cruicial to a successful setup. While in the setup, change your wifi channel to channel 11. (this seems to have helped me). Make your changes and exit out of your router settings. Make sure you hit “Save” and the router acknowledges the changes you made. Head on over to weather underground and create account. You will need A station ID and station key. This particular unit is called “ACCURITE IRIS 5 and 1 with wifi” hit ok, and fill out your details. WXunderground will create a station id and station key. Copy these down exactly as they appear. They are case sensitive and needs to be entered later EXACTLY as displayed. Write down your home wifi network name and password. You will need this for the setup. Now, you should go over to my accuirte and make account with them. Do all this before you even begin the wifi setup below. Here are steps i took to get station up and running. Find suitable mount location. I suggest using temporary mount until you find ideal spot in your yard that will give you the best readings. Go ahead and put batteries in the sensor. Use lithium batteries, alkaline batteries don’t do very well in low winter time temperatures. Once MOUNTED then carefully put the batteries in the unit. Come back inside and plug in your wifi-display and put backup batteries in the unit so in case of power outage it remembers your settings. On your laptop or phone open new webpage. Type 192.168.4.1 however Don’t press enter. Wait for the sensor and display to sync. Will take about 45 seconds to a minute. You should see on upper left hand corner of display the WIFI SYMBOL (blue) flashing. Your console/sensor is now in wifi-setup mode. Click on available networks (on your phone/laptop). You should see a network called “ACCURITE 5XXX” click on that and connect to that network. (make sure your connected to the accurite network) Go over to the tab with the page 192.168.4.1 selected and you can now press enter. A setup page will appear. Enter your home networks id and password into the fields, then go down and enter your wx underground creidientals. When you have everything entered (remember these are case sensitive) hit save. A message will come up and say “updating settings this may take a few minutes” once it’s done correctly page will reload and say you are successfully connected. Close the page and reconnect to your home wifi network. Download the my accurite app and add your display and sensor. Under share weather in the app, make sure it’s turned on and your WX underground station id and password are entered correctly. This is crucial for sharing to wx underground. As of now, if all is connected correctly you should see all your data on the my acurite app and on the wx underground site. It may take up to 20 minutes or so for data to start streaming to wx underground and for your station ID to show on the map. Just be patient. When i set this up, it took around 10 minutes. Check your my accurite app, you should see data coming in. on the phone app. In the upper left hand corner, you will see “Accurite iris” and there should be a bright green line to the left of the word accurite. When it’s green your good and connected with strong signal, if it’s red, your disconnected. The display will show wifi and sensor signal strength. Take the display (with AAA backup batteries installed) and move it to different locations in your home and see how strong wifi and sensor signal strength performs in various locations. I had to move my display around in a few locations to find a good spot to put the display. The instructions say that you need to have sensor and display within about 330 feet of each other to function correctly. Mine is about 80 feet or so, and i live in a old single wide with aluminum siding. Very surprised that is unit is able to receive the signals though that. Works well. I really wish accurite had made this easy to set up. I had to read forums/try several different things to get this to finally work like it’s supposed to. Many people have reported the same wifi issues. Not sure why accurite made this so very difficult to setup. Once it’s setup and connected it’s great. Great graphs on my accurite and instruments are agreeing with other local weather stations. You will want to mount the sensor so it’s easy to reach for maintenance, (cleaning the rain gauge) changing batteries etc. The display has different brightness settings so you can have in your bedroom if you chose. That’s where mine is located. However, i placed it on the low setting so it doesn’t light up my room at night. Prior to doing instructions as listed, I was only able to stay connected for 3 hours max. It’s now been over 24 hours and it’s performing perfectly. I can see my station on wx underground and can access real time information from the app. So far, im satisfied, i will update later as time goes on. update*** 10/27/22*** after working flawlessly for over a month..I received a alert from my accurite saying my iris 5 and 1 had lost wi-fi connection.. the strange thing was that i have FULL WIFI signal strength, along with full sensor signal strength. repeated the wifi setup..it took several attempts (probably around 10 attempts or so) to finally get the the sensor to re-connect to wifi and start transmitting again. i was offline for a little over 24 hours. lost connection to Weather underground as well. One thing that i did notice, Weather underground put out a notice that due to a update they did, you NOW have to use the station key provided for weather underground in the my accurite app, otherwise the data from your sensor will not be shared on weather underground. before, i was just using my weather underground password. this is a new requirement, something weather underground has done within the past month or so. my router has a guest 2.4ghz guest network. I placed my iris 5 and 1 on that network, this way it has it's own network and no other device can conflict with it and cause problems. i previously had it on my other wifi network with 10 other devices. i suspect that is where the problem was. but i can't say for sure. knocked off another star on this review. it's a great unit that provides great data, but the software is terrible. tried to connect with customer service, they were very responsive, however they kept me in circles because I had already tried all their suggested troubleshooting tips several times. i will update this review as time goes on.
