Alpha Group Consulting has had more than a decade of experience with a wide range of soil moisture monitoring tools. Tools such as neutron probes, gophers, gypsum blocks, t-bugs, full stops, diviners, C-Probes and Enviro scans have all been used. The most reliable product which has produced consistently high quality data has been continual logging capacitant probes. Various configurations of these have been used with good results. The most common configuration used is a “Sentek Enviroscan Plus”. This unit takes a moisture reading in the field every hour (or more frequently if preferred), and then sends the data back to a central webpage via a “Next-G” modem. This data transfer will occur at a preset time period, ie every two hours.
This type of probe will provide quality data which can be graphed to show a wide range of trends, some of which are listed below;
Total daily water usage
Moisture levels relative to refill point
Moisture levels relative to fill point lines
Rainfall / irrigation events
Plant “drinking”
Depth of plant water usage
Water “escaping” from the root zone
Alpha Group is well positioned to supply your business with its irrigation scheduling requirements. The service which the Alpha Group offers is a full package which includes probe installation, site maintenance, data hosting, scheduling information and product maintenance.
Two scheduling services are offered by the Alpha Group, a manual reading service using a “Sentek Diviner” and the continual logging probes.
