It rains indoors at Raywood resident Gary Blake's home.
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His homemade rain gauge, "a great conversation starter", is built into his living room wall.
"People think it is a bit fascinating."
A head on his brown brick home's roof collects water before running through a copper pipe and into a vessel in the wall.
Mr Blake said he thought the living room contraption made for better readings.
"I measure it and can write it down immediately," he said.
"Whereas if you're out in the yard, you think 'oh, we had 12mm', and you wander off to do your other jobs and forget about it."
A dry land farmer, the gauge was more than a novelty for Mr Blake who said his livelihood depended entirely on weather.
"And the weather has changed in the last 25 to 30 years," he said.
"The weather patterns are shifting and rain patterns have shifted at least two months forward."
'I am a real weather nerd'
There was a much more high-tech device sitting atop a pole on Josephine Raw's Longlea property.
Her electronic gauge looked more like a small weather station.
"It is the whole kit and caboodle," she said.
Ms Raw could trace her weather obsession back to her father, an air force pilot, who used to shoosh his children when the news would read the weather of an evening.
"I think [my father] over-believed in the Bureau of Meteorology," she said.
"He was in the London to Christchurch Air Race in 1953 and he was coming first and the Bureau told him to go via Woomera and he got a frozen nose wheel ... and came second."
Now, Ms Raw starts every morning by checking data her gauge sends to her iPad.
It tells her a lot more than just the rainfall.
From wind chill to wind direction to solar radiation, the data collected from the station is collated in an app. She also keeps her yearly records in manilla folders and uploads her observations online.
While not having lived long enough at the property to notice trends, Ms Raw said her overflowing dam and wrecked driveway told the tale of increased rainfall.
"When we started building the dam was nearly empty, and that's what we thought was typical Bendigo. We thought it would be very rare to see it full," she said.
"But for the last two years we've had it as full as it gets."
Ms Raw has never considered a career as a meteorologist, but her husband tells her she is "weather obsessed".
"I am a real weather nerd," she said.
