Frequently asked questions

You need a soil sensor that can reach the internet one of three ways: HTTPS over Wi-Fi (for example an ESP32), MQTT, or LoRaWAN through The Things Network. There is no proprietary hub to buy and nothing to plug into your sprinkler system. When you claim a device, the setup screen hands you everything the device side needs: your ingest endpoint, the exact request-signing snippet, an MQTT publish example, and the complete Things Network payload formatter for LoRaWAN nodes. Our reference ESP32 firmware ships with the hardware rather than as a web download.

Most people are seeing live readings in about ten minutes. You create an account, claim the sensor with the ID and claim code printed on it, choose how it connects, then copy the credentials the screen gives you onto the device. The dashboard watches for the first reading and tells you the moment it arrives, so you are never left wondering whether it worked.

In the part of the lawn you actually care about, away from the edge of a bed, a downspout, or a spot that puddles. Push the probe in so the sensing section sits in the root zone rather than in the top inch of thatch, which dries out far faster than the roots do and will make the lawn look thirstier than it is. If your irrigation has zones that behave differently, that is the case for a second sensor.

One per area that gets watered differently or behaves differently. A single front lawn on one sprinkler zone is one sensor. A front and back on separate zones, or a shady strip that stays damp for days, are better with one each, because averaging them hides the problem you are trying to find. Every extra sensor is billed the same and shows up as its own card, with a comparison tool for looking at them side by side.

The measurements are generic soil and microclimate readings, so raised beds, borders, allotments and greenhouses all work. The watering advice assumes turfgrass, because the crop coefficient it applies is a grass coefficient — for vegetables or shrubs the readings and trends are still useful but treat the recommended runtime as a starting point rather than gospel.

Eight things: soil moisture as volumetric water content from 0 to 100 percent, soil temperature, air temperature, air humidity, light level in lux, rainfall, battery voltage and signal strength. Everything else on the dashboard, including the Lawn Health Score and the watering advice, is derived from those readings rather than measured separately.

It uses the Hargreaves reference-evapotranspiration model from the FAO-56 standard, with the extraterrestrial radiation term computed from your latitude and the day of year rather than assumed, then applies a grass-specific crop coefficient to get your lawn actual demand. It subtracts the rainfall your own sensor recorded in the last 24 hours and checks where your soil moisture sits in its band. It is deliberately conservative: if the soil is already in range, or rain has covered the demand, it tells you not to water.

A single number from 0 to 100 blending five things: whether soil moisture is in the right band, how stable it has been, heat and cold stress, light, and how fresh the data is. The score on its own is not the useful part, though. Alongside it we name the limiting factor, meaning the one input dragging the number down, so you know what to fix first instead of guessing.

Your own sensor reports rainfall, so the system reacts to what actually fell on your lawn rather than what a regional forecast predicted a few miles away. That local measurement is what lets it cancel a watering recommendation, and it is also what stops the leak detector crying wolf every time there is a storm.

Yes. The anomaly scanner watches for soil moisture climbing when no rain was recorded and no watering was logged, which is the signature of a stuck valve or a burst line. It also flags sensors that have frozen on one value, sudden dropouts, and readings that are physically implausible. Rainfall is summed across the whole detection window before anything is raised, so a storm is not mistaken for a leak.

No, and that is deliberate for now. monitorMyLawn tells you when to water and for how long; you or your existing controller do the watering. That keeps it compatible with any irrigation setup, including a hose and a timer, rather than only working with one brand of smart valve.

Wi-Fi over HTTPS is the simplest if the lawn is within reach of your house Wi-Fi, and it needs nothing extra. MQTT suits people who already run a broker or a home-automation setup and want the sensor on the same fabric as everything else. LoRaWAN is the answer for a paddock, an allotment or a far corner where Wi-Fi does not reach, because it trades bandwidth for range. You pick per device, so a mixed fleet is fine.

Only if you choose the Wi-Fi option. That is exactly the problem LoRaWAN solves: the sensor talks to a Things Network gateway rather than your router, so range stops being about your Wi-Fi signal. If you are not sure your Wi-Fi reaches, check with a phone at the spot where the sensor will live before committing.

Reporting interval is set on the device, so it is your choice. Every five to fifteen minutes is typical and comfortably inside our limits. Ingest is capped at thirty readings per minute per device, which is far above any sensible lawn cadence and exists to stop a misconfigured device flooding the system. Reporting more often costs battery and tells you very little extra, because soil moisture moves slowly.

Readings buffered on the device are accepted when it reconnects, and a late reading will not rewind your "last seen" time. If nothing arrives for three hours we raise an offline alert and email you. The dashboard shows the last-seen time on every card, and the Lawn Health Score down-weights stale data so a dead sensor never quietly reports a healthy lawn.

Every HTTPS reading is signed with an HMAC and carries a timestamp, so a reading cannot be forged or replayed more than five minutes later. MQTT devices get their own broker credentials and are locked to their own topic, so one device cannot read or write another. Device secrets are stored only as hashes and are shown to you exactly once, at the moment they are issued.

Out of the box: soil moisture dropping below fifteen percent, battery below 3.3 volts, frost at or below freezing, heat stress above about ninety degrees Fahrenheit, and a sensor going offline. On top of those you can add your own threshold rules on any metric, and smart rules for things like leak detection and sensor faults.

No. An alert has to clear a separate, lower threshold before it is considered resolved, so a reading hovering on the line cannot flap between raised and cleared. There is also a cooldown before the same alert can fire again for the same sensor. You can set quiet hours, and choose which channels you want, per account.

In the dashboard and by email. You control which categories email you, set quiet hours so nothing wakes you at three in the morning, and can opt into a weekly digest on whichever day of the week you choose.

Yes. Any metric, above or below a value you pick, with a severity and an optional sustained-for duration so a single odd reading does not trigger anything. The duration is genuinely enforced against your reading history rather than being decorative.

Four dollars ninety-nine per device per month, or forty-nine per device per year, which works out at about two months free. Every feature is included at both tiers — there is no plan where the useful tools are held back. The hardware is a separate one-time purchase.

Per sensor. One account can hold as many as you like and you have one subscription, whose quantity simply tracks how many sensors are active. Add a sensor and the quantity goes up; deactivate one and it comes back down on the next invoice.

At any time, from the billing portal, with no phone call and no retention script. You can also deactivate a single sensor rather than cancelling everything, which drops your quantity by one and leaves the rest running. Your historical data stays available while the account is open.

A sensor that is not paid for stops being able to send new readings, but the history you already have stays yours: you can still sign in, view it, and export it as CSV. Nothing is deleted because an invoice failed.

Talk to us. For a genuine problem in the first month we would rather refund you than argue, and for landscapers, groundskeepers or anyone deploying a batch of sensors there is room to discuss pricing. Both of those are a conversation rather than a form.

You do. We do not sell it, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not aggregate it into a product sold to someone else. It exists so your lawn dashboard works.

Yes, as CSV, per sensor, straight from the dashboard, in either the units you use for display or the raw canonical units. It covers up to two years and four hundred thousand rows per download. There is also a full account export in JSON that includes your devices, alerts and settings, not just readings.

Full-resolution readings are kept for ninety days. Beyond that we keep hourly averages for thirteen months and daily averages indefinitely, so your long-term trends and year-on-year comparisons survive without us storing every individual sample forever. Nothing in the system grows without a bound.

Yes. Each sensor can generate a read-only public report link containing no personal information, which you can send to a landscaper, a groundskeeper or an HOA. It shows the readings and the trends, nothing about you, and you can revoke it instantly.

Everything goes: your devices, your readings, your alerts and your settings, along with the login records that carry your email address. The security log entries we are required to keep for fraud prevention are stripped of anything identifying you first, and they expire on their own schedule. It is a real deletion, not a hidden flag.

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