When Your Weather Station Gets Chatty

So I decided my Tempest weather station needed to learn how to text me. Because apparently, looking outside like a caveman wasn’t cutting it anymore.

The Goal: Get real-time weather alerts on my phone through ntfy. Simple, right?

The Reality: Two hours of Home Assistant telling me my wind speed was “unavailable” while I watched leaves literally blowing past my window.

Turns out weather.home wasn’t pulling from my actual weather station—it was getting data from some mysterious forecast API that apparently updates on geological timescales. Meanwhile, sensor.st_00136021_wind_speed was sitting there with real-time data the whole time, just waiting for someone to notice it.

Then came the Great JSON Disaster of 2026, where every notification looked like:

{"message":"High winds detected: 3.4 mph","title":"⚠️ Wind Alert","priority":"default"}

My phone was basically getting raw API responses instead of, you know, actual messages. Very helpful. Much notification.

The fix? Skip Home Assistant’s fancy REST notify platform entirely and just curl it like it’s 2005. Worked perfectly. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.

Now I get:

• ⚠️ High wind alerts (at 20+ mph, not Portland’s usual “gentle breeze”)
• 🥶 Freezing temps (≤32°F)
• 🔥 Heat warnings (≥90°F, so like, twice a year)
• 💧 Heavy rain (because this is Oregon, this will get annoying)
• ⚡ Lightning strikes with distance (nature’s “you should probably go inside” feature)

The best part? Testing the lightning alert at 10am on a clear day and getting “⚡ Lightning detected 0 miles away.” My phone is now a certified drama queen.

Lessons learned:

1. Always use the actual sensor, not the aggregated weather entity
2. When Home Assistant gets complicated, just use curl
3. My weather station now has better notification hygiene than most of my friends

Total setup time: 2 hours Number of times I said “it works locally”: 0 (surprisingly) Probability I’ll actually go inside when it warns me about lightning: 30%

Worth it? Absolutely. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go acknowledge my “High winds detected: 2.3 mph” alert. 🌪️