Just took a look your device. A few things I’m seeing:
- Battery level is good. Actually even the previous battery level before the battery swap on July 1 (UTC time) was good. GeoDrops Droplet device is quite efficient and can use a battery down to pretty low voltage, so even the used battery you put in before would probably had a good 3-6 months battery life or so.
- Regarding the slow update, it’s most likely due to our partial Cloud service outage announced here. This has now been fixed, sorry about that! (see more details about the GeoDrops Cloud service outage here).
Finally, regarding the weird moisture level. The soil installation seems to be quite loose. I’d strongly recommend reinstalling in a new location.
- This poor reading is typically caused by inserting the device into the same soil location multiple times.
- For your soil readings, I’d suggest moving the device to a new location in your soil (at least 5 inch or 15cm away from the current installation location).
- Pick a new undisturbed soil location, and try to install the device in a single attempt as much as you can.
- Lastly, when performing deep watering calibration to let GeoDrops AI detect max soil moisture level, it’s best to either turn on your irrigation system as you would normally do, or if you water by hand or via a water hose, use a shower head. Reason for this is that it looks like watering has ended up washing more of the already loose soil away, so now the probe has even worse soil contact.
Just remember that capacitive soil sensors work by having a solid contact between the soil and the sensor probes. The better the initial installation (by not disturbing the soil, keeping it as stiff and tight as possible when inserting the sensor into the ground), the faster the reading will stabilize.
Please read this post to learn more about how to install your device: Link to Sensor Install Tips.
Let me know if this helps and if you have other questions. Happy to help more as needed!
Lawrence