insane:

 

Can someone please explain briefly (don't spend too much time) why you might want to have one of these? 

 

You can look outside and see it's raining, sunny, windy, snowing etc, and weather reports make some attempt of predicting future conditions. I just don't see why you'd want to spend money so that you can pull out your phone for it to say it's hot when you can already tell.

 

If you have home automation you need it as a sensor for the computers, not primarily to know what the weather is which can be optained from other sources. Hence a simple weather station doesn‘t make much sense. But if you have rain indication, rain amount, light sensors and local wind strength, the home can react to this very local events accordingly. i.e. when it rains, it makes not much sense to let the mowing robot out, or to water the garden. When storm comes up, the window flaps can be closed automatically.

So one must see it as a big sensor array for the computers, not necessarily to watch the weather itself (but you can). I don’t even have a dedicated display unit but web interfaces instead.