The Davis Wireless Leaf & Soil Moisture/temperature Station Review

Apart from farmers and keen gardeners this is a bit of self indulgence. The station allows you to add up to four temperature sensors, Four soil moisture sensors and two leaf wetness sensors. You can use this too measure the ground temperature at various depths, Sun temperature, Ground temperature or have a probe in your pond. Soil moisture is a good indication of how dry the ground is and whether you need to water or not. Leaf wetness measures the amount of dew and precipitation left on surfaces. It's also a good indication of rainfall. Farmers would use for Fungus and disease control. . When using a soil moisture sensors the corresponding temperature probe will be used for temperature compensation so ideally you'd place these at the same depth. Please note the station is only suitable for Davis VP2, Davis Weatherklink Live, Davis Enviromonitor and the Envoy station. The station will not work with the vantage Vue console.

Installation of the Station.

To prepair the installation you should soak the soil moisture for 24 hours. Choose the location where you want the station Measure out the depths you wish to put the temperature probes, Moisture sensor and choose a location for the leaf wetness sensor. Setting the transmitter ID is the same procedure as any other Davis sensors. Connecting the wired sensors is the most difficult part of the operation as the connector releases are very stiff and may wish to fit the cables before mounting the station. The leaf wetness sensor is a RJ connector and a simple plug in. Once all the sensors are plugged in and setup you need to add the station to the Vp2, Weatherlink Live, Envoy or the Enviromonitor via the console or web interfaces. Make you make a note of which probe relates to which depth otherwise matching the entries to the recorded data will be a major task.

Day to day running of the Leaf Wetness Station.

The main things you need to do with the station is keep the leaf wetness sensor clean from bird droppings and overgrowth as these will effect the readings. The moisture sensor will need replacing after several years as it will stop working. The design present in the other sensor and repeaters is also present in the Leaf Wetness station and that is the super cap. This will blow at some point so you'll need to have some soldering skills to replace this. . I was quite surprised too see that cap had actually blown the leg off. The caps will blow again sadly as you can't gets ones of higher voltage which would probably fix the issue. The temperature probes are quite reliable and won't need replacing. Due to the stiffness of the cables it's probably too hard to fix the unit in situ and you'll need to dismantle it. Davis Weatherklink supports the station as do third party programs like CumulusMX, Weather Display who list these as extra sensors.

Overall thoughts on the Leaf wetness Station.

Not a bad piece of kit. Perhaps a revision of the cable connectors is needed and also getting the super cap issue solved for once and for all is also needed. This is disappointing for a unit of this price and simply poor design.