About Us

A small outfit with a specific complaint

PlantSense is built in Somerset by The Infinite Lives Group. It exists because the cheap soil meters on the market share one flaw: they report a number on a scale that has nothing to do with your soil, so the number cannot be trusted, so people ignore it and go back to guessing.

Our answer was calibration. Two button presses anchor the scale to the ground the plant is actually growing in. After that the percentage means something, and a threshold set for a blueberry genuinely differs from one set for a rosemary bush.

No hoops to jump through

You do not need Home Assistant. You do not need an account. Every monitor runs its own page on your home network, so any phone or laptop on your wifi opens it and shows the reading, the plant setting and the calibration controls. That is the product working as intended, not a stripped back free tier.

If you do run Home Assistant, everything is discovered automatically and turns up as normal entities to chart and automate. Plenty of our customers do, and the monitor was built with them in mind. It is simply not a requirement.

Wifi rather than Bluetooth

A deliberate choice. Bluetooth sensors make you walk out to the plant and stand over it to get a reading, which rather defeats the point of having a sensor. Ours sits on your network and reports from wherever you happen to be.

Build it or buy it

The firmware and wiring are open. If you would rather build your own from parts, everything you need is in the downloads and we are glad to have you. If you would rather it arrived working, weatherproofed and ready for the bed, buy one from the shop. Same device either way, and the same help section.

What we publish

Every watering threshold in our plant database is a figure tested on a calibrated monitor, not a number lifted off a seed packet. Where we are unsure, we say so on the plant page rather than inventing a figure that looks authoritative.