Humidity Monitoring for Hardwood Floors: Floor Sentry

Humidity in your home is extremely important for many things: wood flooring, wood furniture, and musical instruments, not to mention a person’s health, skin and hair. Too-low humidity draws the natural moisture out of anything, causing cracking, shrinking, and general aging.

Being based in Western Canada, where it gets drier than dry, we at Timeless were thrilled to come across Floor Sentry, a product to help our customers stave off the effects of low humidity. Not only does it help keep wood flooring in good condition, but by giving people an ongoing awareness of humidity, users will also enjoy better health and skin, which is no small bonus.

What is Floor Sentry?

The Floor Sentry is a small, flat sensing device that goes underneath a hardwood floor. It captures and collects temperature and relative humidity (RH) readings within the hardwood floor and concrete subfloor or underlayment.

How it Works

Installed by your professional flooring installer, Floor Sentry connects to an app for your smart phone. It stores readings, sets reading intervals, displays humidity graphs and more. You can also configure a threshold for notification of low humidity – e.g. 50% or 60%.

Floor Sentry effectively enables you to monitor the health of your floor and subfloor 24/7 so you can take action before damage occurs. It can be installed on solid or engineered wood flooring.

What it Costs

We recommend one sensor for every 1000 square feet of flooring, and one on each level of your home. Your installer will quote you a retail price, but a ballpark is 1- 2% of the cost of your flooring – a very reasonable investment.

The Story of Wagner – Innovators in Humidity Devices

Wagner Meters, a company founded in Oregon in 1965 to create cutting-edge moisture measurement equipment, started by designing humidity devices used in lumber mills.

They later progressed to hand-held humidity meters, and special meters that could be installed into concrete. This still-American, family-owned business has grown to serve customers around the world, holds many patents, and has won several awards for innovation. 

They launched the Floor Sentry device in January 2023.

How To Install Floor Sentry

The device is simple to install, and once installed, you’ll never know it’s there. It is about the size of a credit card, and is designed to be placed snugly within a recessed area of the underside of a wood floor plank. Your installer can easily handle this for you.

Downloading the app and connecting it to the device is done in minutes.

How Long Does the Floor Sentry Last?

Floor Sentry allows you to store over 16,000 readings, and each sensor has a long-life pre-installed battery that can last up to 8 years. The Wagner Sentry app includes a battery indicator to keep track of the battery’s health, but there is no beeping when the battery gets low.

That said, within a year or two, you will likely know what proper humidity feels like. This will get your home’s humidifiers into a good rhythm, and you should find that you don’t need to look at the Floor Sentry app as often. 

The battery is a Lithium-Manganese (Li-MnO2) pouch cell, which has the same composition as a coin cell battery. These small batteries are non-rechargeable and not replaceable. However, if you need a new device, you can remove the old plank, and install a new device in the same spot.  Since there’s a good chance that the plank may be damaged when removed, it’s always good to have a few extra planks of any hardwood floor you purchase, to be sure they match up. 

Actually, having a few extra planks or tiles is good advice for any floor you buy – because you never know when you might get the crazy-glue-plus-burn-mark-mother-of-all-stains on a floor. 

Case Study – A Flooring Installer’s Opinion

Lucas Huffaker is a flooring contractor who has used Wagner’s Orion 950 moisture meter for many years to ensure his wood floors are ready for installation. Now, he’s using the Floor Sentry as well. In the past year, he has installed it in all his customers’ floors.

Lucas calls it “a great way to protect that investment” since he’s installing high-end floors, sometimes costing $50,000 or more. Including one, two, or three Floor Sentry monitoring devices with each project is hardly a dent in the project’s total cost, and it gives him that added assurance that the floors are protected.

He adds, “It’s a system that works really well with how we do floors, and I like to be able to have that control and also monitoring capability after [installation].”

(It also helps him know if any warranty claims are his fault, or the customers’ – so this is a sensor that makes “sense” for both the buyer and seller.)

Protect Your Flooring Investment

By continuously monitoring temperature and relative humidity, Floor Sentry helps prevent moisture-related issues before they become serious problems. Its easy installation process, long battery life, and seamless smartphone app make it an indispensable tool for anyone invested in the longevity and beauty of their wood floors.

Your wood furniture and musical instruments will also thank you, even if your family forgets to.

So, we encourage you to protect your floors, enhance their lifespan, and maintain their aesthetic appeal with the Floor Sentry – a small investment that yields significant returns.

We wish to thank Wagner Meters and i7 Marketing, for their contributions to this blog.