Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408130008
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HOT SPRINGS LENGTH: Long
Now that you've got your VCR and your satellite dish and your high-definition TV, maybe it's time to consider the next addition to your home entertainment center.
A weather instrument.
Or, as its Bath County designer prefers, a "weather appliance," as essential to the good life as, say, a coffee maker or a microwave.
Weather-sensitive industries such as utilities have long shelled out bucks for customized weather reports; channel-surfers can catch a wave on The Weather Channel. Now a tiny Hot Springs company, Weather Dimensions Inc., thinks gadget-happy consumers are ready to join their commercial counterparts in plunking down $1,795 for their own computerized home weather station.
Take Roanoke lawyer Clinton Morse, for example.
A certifiable trend-setter, he's Weather Dimensions' first residential customer and a prime example of the consumer market the company thinks is waiting to be developed.
"When I was growing up, I had a weather station at my house," Morse says. "I kept it for years." Trouble was, it was a primitive device that required him to record the measurements by hand in his daily log.
So when Morse saw one of Weather Dimensions' computerized appliances in commercial use at Roanoke Gas Co., he had to have one for his living room. "Appliance," he says, is too prosaic a word to describe a computer screen that's jazzed up with a rainbow of color graphics and runs 24 hours a day plotting weather trends - like a never-ending Nintendo game in the sky.
"The kids and I love it," Morse says. "It's interesting, when a storm is coming, to watch the barometric pressure dropping. It's educational and something we enjoy watching. That rain gauge is fascinating."
Morse was fascinated, too, that the company's owner came to his South Roanoke home personally to hook up the appliance. Especially when that owner is Dan Ingalls Jr. - who until last year was running The Homestead resort.
\ Ingalls says the weather, like the resort, has been kind of a family tradition. The Homestead long kept a barometer in its lobby to record the weather's mood swings on a long strip of paper, a relic of the turn-of-the-century days when that was the closest the hotel's guests could get to a weather report of any kind.
"Being a nerdy kid, I always thought it was neat," Ingalls says.
When he returned to The Homestead in 1987, setting aside a computer career in California's Silicon Valley to try to save the family business, the old barometer was still there. "Somebody changed the paper in it every day," Ingalls marvels.
Ingalls didn't leave the computer programming world completely when he came back to Hot Springs. On the side, he tinkered with a way to combine his computer background with his interest in weather. "I like the weather," he says. "I like following it. I like storms. There are a set of people who are this way."
So he bought some weather sensors - rain gauges, thermometers, barometers and the like - from a weather-instrument supply house in Maine, then rigged them up to display their minute-by-minute results on a computer screen.
Ingalls perfected the first version of his weather station in 1991 and had it installed in The Homestead's lobby, replacing the old barometer.
After the Ingalls family sold The Homestead last fall to Club Resorts Inc. of Dallas, Ingalls decided it was time to test his pet project in the marketplace.
He's set up a two-person company - he and marketing director Beth Beiderman - to try to put Hot Springs, and his weather station, on the national weather map.
Since October, Weather Dimensions has sold about two dozen of the devices, or about $45,000 worth. That's too big to be a hobby, too small to be a full-fledged industry; Beiderman may be working full-time on it, but Ingalls' main job these days is telecommuting to a Silicon Valley computer research firm. Ingalls calls Weather Dimensions "a small cottage industry," though he's convinced it's one that could someday grow into a mansion. Market research? Not really. "I've always had an intuitive approach to it," he says.
A dozen or so companies around the country sell computerized weather stations, some starting as low as $150, others edging closer to Ingalls' high-end price. But none, Ingalls says, does what his machine does.
The other stations display their readings digitally. Or, if they show the measurements in chart form, the user has to switch from one program to the next to read them all - barometric pressure here, temperature there, precipitation under yet another file.
Ingalls' fort in his Silicon Valley days was inventing visual ways to make the computer easier to use, so it's not surprising his computerized weather station does the same thing.
His Fourth Dimension device takes the weather readings from computerized instruments mounted on a roof or fence, relays them to the computer terminal inside and displays all the measurements visually, usually with wavy trend lines. Most important, Ingalls says, his machine puts all the readings on the computer screen at the same time.
That way, he says, the user can see at a glance how different weather phenomena are interrelated - for instance, how the barometer and the temperature started falling just before the clouds cut loose with a gully-washer and the winds started howling out of the west.
What's more, Ingalls points out, the memory stores up to 10 years' worth of such weather data. With a tappity-tap of the keyboard, the user can organize it just about any which way - comparing the past 24 hours against the last three weeks, the last three years.
Ingalls' unique design appears popular with those who have seen it.
"On a couple of occasions up at The Homestead, I saw this out by the door," says Frank Farmer, Roanoke Gas chairman. "It told me a lot of things I'd never see in that perspective." So he bought one for the utility. "It really is a handy tool. The big thing about it is, you can see what's happening [with the weather], and you can point to changes in the weather before the National Weather Service lets us know."
For Roanoke Gas, the Fourth Dimension is a tool that supplements the weather forecasts the company buys from private meteorologists to help it plan for sudden heat waves and cold fronts. For home users, it may be a toy. Either way, Virginia state Climatologist Pat Michaels predicts the instrument will be a big hit. "Ingalls' equipment is high-tech. I'd say it's the kind of equipment that will be very popular."
Jeff Rosenfeld, the managing editor of Weatherwise, a Washington-based magazine for weather buffs, agrees - and showers praise on Ingalls' work.
Of all the computerized weather stations on the market, "none are exactly like Weather Dimensions," he says. "It's a nice way of being able to look at things. Some of the more experienced observers I've talked to say they do prefer the kind of readouts that the Fourth Dimension has. It's real helpful in spotting trends, and trends are what weather is all about."
\ So what are the trends on the weather market - and Weather Dimensions, in particular?
That's easy to forecast but difficult to quantify - a little like saying rain is on the way, but no one knows how much.
No one seems quite sure just how big the market for weather instruments really is.
The best-known companies tend to be small, privately held companies that are loath to release sales figures. "I'd say the largest companies probably don't hire more than 15 employees," says A.B. Patterson, vice president of Texas Weather Instruments in Dallas, one of the industry's leaders.
But the field must be growing, says Rosenfeld, the Weatherwise editor. "I get that question often, because people are starting up companies," he says. So does the American Meteorological Society in Boston. "We're getting calls like this from weather instrument manufacturers all the time," says associate executive director Keith Seitter.
Why has the weather become a thunder-booming business?
"The environmental movement has helped it a lot, because of the Environmental Protection Agency," Patterson says. "A lot of weather instruments are required for landfills and oil refineries," or just about any enterprise subject to environmental regulations involving temperature and humidity. His company has even sold weather instruments to prisons, some of which need to keep detailed records on cell conditions to satisfy civil libertarians.
It's this heavy-duty market of commercial, industrial and government users that Ingalls originally figured he would exploit - first by advertising in business magazines and weather journals. Customers so far include Virginia Power, the U.S. Navy, an emergency services center in Michigan, a smattering of colleges, even a casino in Las Vegas.
What does a casino need with a weather station? Eight times a day, the Treasure Island resort stages a naval battle between a pirate ship and a British man of war, a pyrotechnic extravaganza that includes 30 stunt people, ignites some 30 liters of liquid propane, and ends with a cannon blast that sinks the British ship. "This is Las Vegas," casino spokesman Alan Feldman says. "The pirates always win."
But the Las Vegas fire marshal wasn't taking any chances with all that gas floating around in the air. The casino is required to check the wind speed at three points around the battle scene to make sure the propane has dissipated. To do that, the casino turned to Weather Dimensions, whose device plots not only wind speed but wind direction. "There can be no margin of error," Feldman says. "These explosions are real."
Ingalls, meanwhile, has discovered another real explosion out there - in the weather-instrument market for hobbyists, folks for whom weather-watching is entertainment. "It's a big market," says Michaels, the Virginia climatologist. There's always been latent interest in weather-watching, he says. "But in the last 10 years, two things have happened. One, the price of the hardware has come down, and two, the computer has allowed all this data to be stored and displayed."
"The prices [of weather instruments] used to be outrageous," says Seitter, with the American Meteorological Society. "Now they're in a price range that make them available to the general public."
And the public is buying.
The best circumstantial evidence of this growing market comes in the form of Wind & Weather, a California-based mail-order catalog devoted to weather instruments and weather paraphernalia for hobbyists. Founded in 1976, the catalog now boasts "a couple of hundred thousand people" on its mailing list, according to owner Mike Rogers. "I won't say they're all weather people, but weather vanes and weather instruments make up two-thirds of the business."
The demographics are curious, though - all ages, all incomes, but dominated by one gender. "For some reason," Rogers says, "watching the weather is kind of a male activity."
Weather Dimensions wants to be poised to reach all these weather-watchers, not just the ones reading the specialized journals the company has advertised in so far.
Ingalls sees the young company's future in software, not hardware. For one thing, he doesn't make the hardware; he just buys wholesale and repackages the equipment with his software. But dealing with all those boxes can be bulky and time-consuming, especially for a small operation like Weather Dimensions that for now is run out of Beiderman's home.
Instead, Ingalls would much rather just copy his software onto a computer disk and sell that. Accordingly, he's designed his program so that it can be used on the computerized weather stations made by the biggest names in the weather-instrument field.
That way, he says, he hopes to turn potential competitors into collaborators. This summer, Beiderman has been contacting the major weather-instrument makers to see if they'd like to carry Weather Dimensions' software. For Weather Dimensions, it's a way to reach a bigger market with less overhead; for the hardware manufacturers, it's a way to both cut costs (they don't have to design their own software) and to encourage repeat sales (to customers who want to upgrade their equipment).
It's early, but some manufacturers already have signed up. "I'm quite impressed," says Patterson, of Texas Weather Instruments. Ingalls "certainly seems to know what he's doing."
Wind & Weather, meanwhile, is thinking about including Weather Dimensions' products - both hardware and software - in its next catalog. "What they're doing is great," Rogers says. "Totally great."
Beiderman, Weather Dimensions' marketing director, is convinced the weather station may become the next status symbol.
"Ultimately," she says, "this is something you'd see in the Sharper Image catalog."
by CNB