Soil sensors

Wire a moisture probe to a zone and the engine stops guessing: the probe’s reading replaces the modeled bucket as the zone’s gate.

Supported paths in:

• Ecowitt soil probes (WH51 and friends) via a LAN gateway poll: native, no cloud, includes temperature, conductivity, and battery per probe.
• Any Home Assistant soil sensor entity, through an HA bridge source.
• MQTT topics and HTTP webhooks for DIY probes.

Assignment happens in the zone’s settings (Settings > Zones > pick the zone > soil sensor). One probe per zone; the Sensors hub shows which zones each source feeds.

How the engine uses it:

• Below the zone’s target band: the zone is eligible; runs size to the deficit as usual.
• Inside the band: healthy; scheduled runs still apply unless the saturation threshold says otherwise.
• At or above saturation: the zone skips on its own, even when the day’s verdict is Run, and the skip reason names the probe.
• If a probe goes offline, or reads as a wild outlier versus its neighbours, it is flagged as an anomaly on the irrigation and zones views.

The Sensors hub and each zone’s detail show the probe’s live reading, the target band, and a 7-day no-watering projection so you can sanity check that the moisture curve actually behaves like your yard.

A probe also unlocks the tuning report’s two calibration checks: the drying-drift check (does your soil dry at the rate the configured texture and root depth predict?) and the sprinkler-rate backout (what rate do your heads actually deliver, per the probe’s rise across waterings?). Both need LocalSky’s own recorded probe history, so they work for probes connected through a source (the Ecowitt gateway poll, MQTT, webhooks); a zone bound to a live Home Assistant entity has no local history and reports that state honestly.