Arduino Soil Moisture Sensor Range

Other Hardware Sensors
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Hi People,

I am building a small home project for my kitchen garden. The idea is to check the moisture level in my soil and turn on my dripper only when the soil is dry. I am confident on getting things work, but I have some doubts about the reliability of soil moisture senor with Arduino

I am using this sensor shown below

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As per my understanding, these are cheap sensors without any manufacturer datasheet. So can i trust them to work. Most importantly with the range, there does not seem to be enough information about it

I found this tutorial on soil moisture sensor which talks about the range to be around 20cm which is highly not practical, so wanted to know the experience from this forum members to decide if i should go forward with this sensor

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The sensor measures how wet the soil is by measuring the resistance between the two prongs of the sensor. It cannot measure how wet the soil is that it is not in contact with. As a result, 20cm "range" is, I think, optimistic

As I understand it, the worst problem with such sensors is the degradation of the electrodes due to the presence of a voltage difference between them

3

Those are OK if you want to do an experiment in a glass of water for 5 minutes, they will corrode and wear out quickly.

here is something to watch

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