Having green plants around the house and office is known to be beneficial, but not all of us seem to have the green thumb necessary to keep those plants in tip-top condition. That’s where this nifty new gadget comes in. The Thirsty Light is a small device that looks like a lime green lollipop with an oval pod on the top. You simply stick the 6 ½” long device in the soil of any houseplant.

The special patent-pending Drypoint technology which is embedded in the tip of the probe, constantly measures the electrical resistance of the soil environment, testing it once per second. The resistance is lower when moisture is present and more dissolved salts are in the moisture. When the probe determines that the soil needs more moisture, a small LED light in the pod portion of the device starts to blink.

The Thirsty Light folks recommend on of two methods for use of this gadget:
1. The Leave-in Method — Place one Thirsty Light in each plant allowing for constant monitoring of the soil moisture, or
2. The Quick-check Method –Use on Thirsty Light for all your indoor plants by moving it from plant to plant.

At $9.95 per Thirsty Light, the leave-in method, which is probably the best, can be pricey if you have a lot of plants. Having only one Thirsty Light to work with, I tried the more economical quick-check method of moving the probe from plant to plant. However, I found that to be problematic. It seems that for some plants you have to put the probe a little deeper into the soil to get the best reading. On top of that, moving the probe around became almost a full time job, as one plant needed water one day, and another the next day.

Certainly that would be the best for the plants, but I just wasn’t up to that amount of “plant care time”. Yet, I found the Thirsty Light extremely useful with my own methodology. It took me a few weeks, but with a little experimentation, I found the plant that seemed to be the average plant for my plant collection. I put the Thirsty Light in that plant and whenever the light was blinking, I watered all the plants. This worked extremely well, except for one thing, the blinking light is quite small and you can easily miss its alert when it is surrounded by the leaves of the plant. The solution to that dilemma was to move the plant with the thirsty light to the kitchen window where I see it at eye-level every morning.

I have now been using the Thirsty Light with this method for several months and my plants look great. The Thirsty Light reminds me when it is time to water and my plants thank me for not forgetting them, as I often used to.

Depending on the types of plants you own and the type of care taker you are, you can develop your own methodology of how to use the Thirsty Light. The small device even has an on-off switch in case you want to keep it in a drawer and pull it out to monitor the soil on your own time schedule. It has a replaceable small watch battery. My Thirsty Light has been working for 6 months without replacement.