Rain gauge gets stuck

Hello, I have issues with particular rain gauge. Hopefuly someone has already encountered something like this.

The rain gauge is mechanical “tipping” one, but it does not have two containers for water / two stable states.

It has just one “spoon” which collects water and once it is full it should tip and empty itself and return to default state with empty spoon in upper position. Problem is that sometimes after tipping it does not return back and it can take hours, days, even week or more till some random thing happens and the bucket/spoon returns back to its position.

This is not nice behavior, but ok. Much worse is that this rain gauge is connected to datalogger which is designed for tipping rain gauge and thus expects just short pulses on rain gauge input. This datalogger can’t handle well permanent on state (short circuit) on its rain gauge input. It just seems to be stuck in some loop and does not do anything till the rain gauge recovers.

I am looking for ideas how to handle such unfortunate scenario.

Three solutions are on my mind:

1. just throw away those cheap rain gauges and use proper ones, cause they are missing some precipitation when stuck anyway
2. try to modify firmware for the logger as I am able to access source code and I don’t understand why the rain gauge input is handled so badly.
3. connect some simple circuitry between logger and rain gauge. Rain gauge is connected between 3.3V voltage source and 10kOhm pull down resistor. In default state, the datalogger input is zero/low. I could use some integrator i guess.

Problem is, of course, that i dont have that much time to tinker with it.

Rain gauges were cleaned and it did not help with the issue. It is just not the most reliable design.

Thank you for help.