Spruce Zigbee Soil Moisture Sensors - driver needed?

Those are just the maximum and minimum values it has reported since you started recording (or reset these values), in case that is helpful. Mine used to range up to 100%, rarely getting close to that but often hovering around 70-80-ish, if I recall, back when things when were working well; when it stayed much lower than that, I usually preferred to water, though your plants/preferences may vary).

Thanks. That makes a ton more sense than what I was thinking.

image

Here is the image showing the sensor locations.

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I concur. Mine was paired and adding the driver afterwards didn’t work.

I therefore unpaired it, reset the device and then paired it again with the driver already installed and that did the trick. The device now reports its status. Thanks! :grinning:

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I looked for these and they are back ordered and won'r be around until May....ANyone have an other sensors that work with HE

So you're telling me my Spruce Sensor's current reading of 328% might be wrong? :rofl:

Screenshot: Spruce Sensor history graph showing 328 percent humidity readings and other oddities on occasion

I've never quote understood the readings it gives, but it seems mostly OK side from these frequent outlier readings, so either I got a dud or this sensor is a bit odd (I see above I had even more odd readings last fall). I'll have to look into the one you mentioned--except I have an AmbientWeather station so will have to get the more expensive branded version, from what I can tell. But the devices otherwise look similar, so hopefully they'll work equally well. Thanks for the recommendation!

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I've got a fairly mature diy Zigbee moisture sensor working well based on this board I make, paired with a standard capacitive soil moisture sensor...

For $25 you can get a battery powered Zigbee board, soil moisture, and air temp. Plus there's 2 more adc inputs and 3 more digital inputs available for adding other sensors.

Hubitat driver works great.

Let me know if you're interested... I can make an ebay listing.

These get my vote too, I recently setup a bunch of them with their WiFi gateway. So impressed with them I ordered a some more and a weather station too, which are on the slooooow boat from China at the moment (I'm in the UK and they don't seem to have any EU or UK distributors).

I did have one initial WH-51 die after a few weeks, not sure what happened to it but it stopped outputting anything and kills the battery in about 6 hours. Ecowitt offered to send a replacement with my new order, pretty good service!

For those of you still interested in Spruce Sensors - Gen3s are back in stock. Email from them offers a "today only" deal

Gen3 Spruce Soil Moisture Sensor
2 Sensors
Regular price $99.99 Sale price
$79.99
Discount: 2-Sensors-for-August-2nd (-$20.00)

NOW....how many of you still use them successfully and can vouch for the Gen3 version being reliable in function & reporting ? Doesn't seem like there are many recent posts validating that.

Mine is currently reporting a humidity of 600-something percent, and it has started eating through batteries every few weeks (the first one lasted close to a year, I think). So, I'm not really happy with mine anymore, but the readings were always weird, so I'm not sure I ever was. :slight_smile: I tried lots of drivers and even tried some conversions myself (maybe 600 is 60%?), but the data still didn't really make sense. When it was under 100%, it did seem reasonable. Maybe it just got really wet inside, but for a sensor that is supposed to be outdoors I don't think I really put it through that hard of a time.

If I did this again, I'd probably get the AmbientWeather soil probe thingy, but I have an AmbientWeather station now, so it's an easier choice than it was for me before (I do have a Hubitat driver for this, though I'm not really sure I have a use for most data in Hubitat). But in the meantime, I'm pretty happy just keeping track of how much rain I got (easier with the weather station!) and doing my best estimating on my own. I don't really care about my lawn (I wasn't using it to control sprinklers)--it was more or less just a neat garden toy for me. :slight_smile:

That's kinda where I was headed with this until they sent me the sale offer. I had wired one of these to a zigbee contact sensor and was in the process of figuring out how to mount the water plate at an angle in a little box that "when still wet" would keep Simple Irrigation from watering. Crude estimation of soil moisture at best. But still, with these kind of reports on the Spruce sensors I'm glad I passed on a new one. Still wouldn't mind playing with a used one. Thanks.

https://www.allelectronics.com/item/rws-1/rain-sensor/moisture-monitor-w/relay/1.html

Curious what range of in-ground moisture % you have seen say over a summer like from just before watering to three days after watering. And are you pretty sure you are getting good insight on what the level is 3-5" down ?

That's actually my concern with all of these; ...that it's really just indicating the surface accumulation in the top inch. Not that the path I was heading with a rain gauge was going to do better...but I keep weighing the trouble of adding these ground sensors on a mis-presumption that they are accurately representing the soil saturation.

No, I need to do exactly what you're doing, in a similarly water challenged situation. But for a couple of acres of plant material. It sounds like you're already running the appropriate science experiment :wink:

Is this a fully assembled device or are you just selling the parts? If fully assembled I am definitely interested.

I paired the v3 sensor without installing the driver ("Spruce wifi master") first so I deleted and unpaired the device. After installing the drivers and rejoining the device I am still unable to see any of the current states. I also disconnected my Smartthings hub when I re-joined the device. The only thing I didn't do was change the zigbee channel which I wasn't comfortable doing because I don't fully understand all the implications of doing so. I'm on zigbee channel 20.

I don't have any issues joining the device but I just don't see any current states once the device has been added to Hubitat. Any advice is appreciated.

Turns out I was using the wrong driver for the gen3 sensor. This one is working for me:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PlaidSystems/Spruce-Hubitat/master/drivers/Spruce%20sensor.src

Make sure to unpair/re-pair after installing the new driver.

For the benefit of everyone's interest in this sensor...
Please come back and update one of the threads on it to let us know if you consistently experience believable data with it long term. There's been some that haven't been happy with it.

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Will do. I did compare ground temperature reported vs actual temp outside and it was only a couple of degrees off. I will water the plants tomorrow and see how much humidity % changes.

Apart from this device is there any other z-wave or ZigBee soil moisture sensor that is commercially available? I could not find one searching the internet.

I too have been looking. There are other platforms / solutions as pointed out in this thread. Some more reliable for the $, but I had hopes on the Spruce to get a version that works reliably at a price point that would allow small Ag deployment.

P.S. I think you'll need a few months before you're sure to have evaluated the data ranges.

After pulling my hair out I found your post. Installed the driver unpaired and repaired the sensor and it's working. I'm using the Temp and Humidity Tiles.