About this site
watts.bar is a personal weather station and dock cam on Watts Bar Lake at Tennessee River Mile 559.5, plus a small reference site about the lake itself. Built and operated by Eli Hodapp.
The hardware on the dock
The live readings come from gear mounted on a private dock at Tennessee River Mile 559.5 in Roane County, Tennessee. The station reports every minute.
- Ecowitt GW3000B base station / gateway
- Ecowitt WS90 7-in-1 multi-sensor: temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, UV, solar radiation, piezo rain detection, barometric pressure
- Ecowitt W40BH heated tipping-bucket rain gauge for accurate winter rainfall totals
- Ecowitt WN34BL waterproof probe submerged off the dock for water temperature
Where each reading on the homepage comes from
| Reading | Source |
|---|---|
| Air temperature, humidity, wind, gusts, UV, rain | WS90 sensor on the dock |
| Water temperature | WN34BL probe submerged off the dock |
| Lake elevation, dam outflow, generation status | TVA's public APIs for the WBOT1 (Watts Bar) and FLDT1 (Fort Loudoun) gauges |
| Annual operating curve | TVA's Watts Bar operating guide |
| Hourly and 10-day forecast | Google forecast for Tennessee River Mile 559.5, refreshed every 30 minutes |
| Radar imagery | RainViewer |
| Active weather alerts | National Weather Service (api.weather.gov) |
| Air quality | EPA AirNow (nearest reporting monitor) |
| Sunrise, sunset, moon phase, illumination | Computed locally for 35.62°N, 84.71°W |
How the data flows
The station uploads readings to a local Home Assistant instance running on a Proxmox cluster on the same network. A Cloudflare Worker (live.watts.bar) queries Home Assistant every minute, pulls TVA dam and lake data, fetches the dock cam, and caches everything in a Cloudflare R2 bucket (data.watts.bar). The frontend on this site reads from R2 first for instant first paint, then upgrades to the live Worker endpoint.
The image at the top of the homepage is a still frame from a camera pointed at the lake, refreshed about as fast as your connection allows.
Encyclopedic content (about the lake, marinas, fishing, events, safety)
The pages on this site that cover Watts Bar Lake itself (geography, marinas, fishing, events, safety) are aggregated from public sources: official organizer and venue sites, county and city tourism pages, agency feeds (TVA, TWRA, TDEC, NWS), and operator listings. Sources are cited inline on every page.
This content can be out of date. Sources change. Marinas change ownership, restaurant hours shift seasonally, tournaments are rescheduled. Always call ahead to verify if something matters. The page-by-page detail pages flag the kinds of fields most likely to drift (fuel availability, transient slip space, restaurant schedule, tournament times) and provide phone numbers wherever available.
Editorial principles
- Useful, not definitive. watts.bar is meant as a useful starting point. For decisions where a wrong answer has consequences (running out of fuel, expecting a transient slip, planning around dam generation), the site links to the authoritative source and asks you to verify there.
- Always cite. Where a fact comes from a public source, the source is linked inline so anyone can check.
- Live data is operational truth. Live readings on the homepage come directly from sensors and TVA APIs. They refresh every minute. They are not editorialized.
- Aggregated content is a snapshot. Treat every other page as a snapshot of public information at the time it was written, not as authoritative. The freshness disclaimer in the footer applies.
What this site is not
- Not for navigation. Use marine charts and current TVA data for any plan that depends on safe water.
- Not the National Weather Service. For official forecasts, watches, and warnings, see weather.gov.
- Not a commercial service. watts.bar is a personal project. There is no service-level agreement, no uptime guarantee, no support contract.
Licenses and reuse
Data and prose published here are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Please attribute to "watts.bar" with a link if you reuse it.
Machine-readable feeds are listed in /llms.txt and include:
- Live conditions JSON
- TVA dam generation JSON
- Marinas database JSON
- Events feed JSON
- Fishing knowledge base JSON
- Lake regions JSON
Contact
Eli Hodapp · hod.app. The repo for the site lives in a private monorepo. Suggestions and corrections are welcome.