Davis VP2 Rain Gauge Goes Beserk After Cleaning

Hopefully my experience may save others time (and potentially money)…

I cleaned my rain gauge, including sloshing water around the tipping buckets to clean the silt out. When I re-connected the rain gauge, it started continuously accumulating rainfall at nearly 200mm/hr!

After much fiddling about, I discovered that the reed switch is actually sitting in a little plastic box with a lid (not encapsulated like it first appeared), and I had filled the box with (quite salty) water which was half-shorting-out the reed switch, which was appearing like frequently occurring bucket tips. After popping the cover off the top of the reed switch and drying out the little box, normal service was resumed.