Most foundation damage starts as a drainage or plumbing problem in the ground, months before anything cracks. MoisturePilot puts wireless probes in the soil around your house, learns what normal looks like for your property, and tells you in plain language when something changes.
Installed and monitored by Motmot Foundation Repair in our Texas service area. Outside it, you can register and we will tell you when we reach you.
Expansive clay swells when it takes on water and shrinks when it dries. When one side of a house holds water and another dries out, the slab is asked to bridge the difference. That is what cracks brick, sticks doors and slopes floors.
A downspout that ends at the wall, a gutter that overflows, a flowerbed graded toward the house, or a slow supply leak under the slab. The soil near it swells while the rest of the property stays where it was.
A long dry spell pulls moisture out of exposed soil faster than out of shaded or irrigated soil. Trees make it sharper by drawing water from one side.
By the time a crack is wide enough to notice, the ground has usually been moving for weeks. The cheap window to act has already closed.
The repair figures are published national ranges for foundation work, and the early-correction figure is our own typical pricing. Neither is a quote. Your property, soil and access decide the real number.
Four parts, and none of them ask you to interpret a chart.
Wireless capacitive probes sit about a foot down at the corners, over the main plumbing runs, at low spots, at any previously repaired area, and at least one out in the open yard as a control. The control is what makes the rest readable, because it shows what the weather alone did.
Each probe reports to a small hub on your Wi-Fi or Ethernet roughly every 70 seconds. The hub keeps a local copy on a memory card if the internet drops.
Over the first 30 to 60 days each sensor learns its normal range, how fast it dries, and how it answers rain. After that, a reading is judged against that spot's history rather than a number picked for every house in the country. 45% can be ordinary at one home and a warning at another.
When a zone leaves its own normal, you get what changed, how quickly, whether rain can account for it, whether the control sensor moved too, and the sensible first call. Plumber, drainage, irrigation, or nothing yet.
A number on its own means nothing. What matters is the shape of the change, whether it rained, and whether the control probe out in the yard moved with it. Those together separate a leak from a drainage problem from a sprinkler you forgot about.
One zone climbs fast and keeps climbing while every other probe, including the yard control, stays flat. Clean water under pressure does not wait for weather.
First call: plumber, pressure testIt rained on the whole property, the control dried back, and this one corner did not.
First call: gutters and gradeThe rise arrives on the same days at the same hour, which weather never does.
First call: sprinkler zoneEverything falls, but one side falls faster. That gap across the slab is what cracks brick.
First call: watering planA small, tidy, seasonal rise next to the unit that stops when the weather cools.
First call: condensate lineThis is the one most people never get. After a drainage correction or a plumbing repair, the same probes show whether the ground actually settled back down, or whether you paid for something that did not fix it. That record is what goes in the property file.
No call needed. Keep watching.The colours follow the utility locate code you have already seen sprayed on a lawn before someone digs: blue for potable water, green for sewer and drain, violet for reclaimed and irrigation. Each panel also names its category in words, so the colour is never the only signal.
The app answers one question first, in words, and keeps the numbers underneath for when you want them.
Draw your rooms or upload a plan, then drop a marker where each probe sits. Every marker carries its status as a color and a word, so you can see at a glance which corner is wet and which is drying out. A slider replays the last 14 days, which is usually how you spot that one zone never recovered after a storm.
Attach a photo of the area each sensor watches. When a reading moves months later, you are looking at the flowerbed or the downspout in question rather than trying to remember which corner sensor four was.
Moisture rose from 34% to 50% and stayed there for five days.
Rain fell on the whole property. The exterior control sensor rose and then dried back within two days. This zone did not.
Water is likely collecting near the rear wall rather than falling on it. A rapid spike with no rain would point at supply plumbing instead.
Drainage. Check the rear downspout and the grade before anyone talks about piers.
MoisturePilot measures soil moisture. Everything past that is inference, and it is labeled as inference.
A sharp rise with no rain narrows it to supply plumbing and tells a plumber where to test. Confirming it takes an isolation or pressure test.
It reads the soil that moves the foundation. Elevation change is a separate measurement, and if readings suggest you need one, the app says so.
You will see "possible" and "likely" throughout, with a confidence figure. Measurements are shown separately from interpretation so you can hand either one to a professional.
The first 30 to 60 days are a learning period. Readings are live immediately, but pattern classification is only as good as the baseline behind it.
Yours once you buy it. Sensors are $60 each and a regular home needs at least 6.
| Measures | Moisture, temperature, EC |
|---|---|
| Method | Capacitive FDR |
| Reading interval | 70 s |
| Range | 0 to 100% VWC |
| Rating | IP66 outdoor |
| Wireless | 915 MHz, up to 100 m |
| Power | 1 AA, low draw |
| Soil channels | Up to 16 |
|---|---|
| Connectivity | Ethernet and Wi-Fi |
| Local storage | microSD backup |
| Antenna | External, high gain |
| Also reads | Temp, humidity, barometric |
| Backup | Battery ready |
Placement follows the actual house rather than a diagram: the four corners, the main plumbing runs, the low corner of the lot, anywhere that has been repaired before, and at least one control sensor out in the open.
The minimum for a regular home. Four corners, one plumbing zone and an exterior control.
Corners, four plumbing zones, the drainage problem area and anything previously repaired.
Full coverage including wet and dry sides, tree and addition zones, and two controls.
Hardware is a one time purchase at $60 per sensor. Professional installation is available in our service area, or you can place them yourself.
Every property also needs one gateway, and each package assumes one. We are finalising its price, the warranty term and the return window, and they will be published here before ordering opens.
One product, two lines on the bill. You buy the sensors once, and you pay monthly for the monitoring that reads them.
Continuous reading and pattern classification, explained alerts by app and email, the property plan, the watering planner, reports you can hand to a plumber, engineer or buyer, and the transferable property health record.
Sensor cost plus twelve months of monitoring. It does not yet include the gateway or professional installation, both listed below.
One gateway is required per property. Its price is being finalised and is not included in the figures above. Professional installation is quoted per property.
If you cancel: the sensors are yours and they keep reporting. You keep current readings, the plan, basic alerts and your data export. The subscription is what adds pattern classification, monitoring by our team, reports and the annual review.
A homeowner is who this is for. These are the other people who end up needing the same record.
Listing period monitoring and a documented moisture history to hand a buyer, so a foundation question does not become a renegotiation on the last day.
Several properties in one place, ranked by which one needs attention, with a vacancy mode and work orders.
A zone map that says where to test first, plus the moisture history to show whether a repair actually fixed it.
Run it under your own brand with your report templates, warranty requirements, team accounts and API access. Arranged directly rather than priced on this page.
The full data package with quality indicators and measurement limitations noted, kept separate from opinion.
Every reading, alert, repair, photo and report stays attached to the property, not to your login. When you sell, the history transfers with it.
A buyer looking at two years of readings and a documented drainage repair can see what was wrong and that it was fixed. Without that, all they have is a patched crack and your word for it.
Timestamped, with what the system concluded and how confident it was.
Drainage corrections, plumbing repairs, pier work, with photos and documents.
What the soil did after the repair, which is the only way to show it worked.
Hand the record to a buyer, an agent, an engineer or an insurer, for as long as you choose.
Share a property with a spouse, an agent, a plumber or an engineer, at the level you pick, and end it when you want.
Give a realtor the listing period and nothing after it.
Your readings and documents download in full. Canceling does not hold them hostage.
We do not sell your property data. Anything used to improve the analysis is aggregated and stripped of address level detail.
We run a foundation repair company. The job almost always starts the same way: someone calls about a crack, and by then the soil has been doing something for weeks or months. The fix that would have cost a few hundred dollars is gone, and we are quoting piers.
Nobody was watching the ground. Annual inspections are a photograph of one afternoon. So we put probes in the soil, gave the analysis the exterior control sensor it needs to tell weather apart from a leak, and made it say plainly what it thinks and how sure it is. It is the tool we wanted on the truck.
Motmot Foundation Repair, Texas.
Yes. The sensors are the product. Without probes in the ground there is nothing to monitor, so MoisturePilot is sold as one thing: soil sensors plus the monitoring subscription that reads them. The app also carries a watering planner, a symptom log and an emergency shutoff guide, but those support the monitoring rather than replace it.
Expansive clay moves continuously, and an inspection only covers the day it happens. Continuous soil moisture data reveals imbalance, drainage failures and slow leaks that would not be visible during a single visit.
Your hardware keeps working. You bought the sensors, so they stay yours, and you keep current readings, the property plan, basic alerts and data export. The subscription is what adds pattern classification, professional monitoring, reports and the annual review.
A 30 to 60 day learning period establishes each sensor's baseline range, drying rate, rain response and seasonal profile. Alerts are judged against your property's own normal rather than a universal threshold, because the same figure means different things on different lots.
Yes. Professional operators can run MoisturePilot white label, with their own logo, colors, report templates and warranty requirements, plus team accounts, work orders and API access. Pricing for that is arranged directly.
Common signs include new cracks in drywall, brick or the slab, doors and windows that stick, sloping or uneven floors, and gaps opening around window frames. These usually appear weeks after the soil around the foundation has already been moving. MoisturePilot watches the soil moisture patterns that drive that movement, such as drainage intrusion, a slow plumbing leak or drought shrinkage, so you can act before it becomes a visible crack.
Foundation repair in the U.S. typically ranges from about $2,000 for minor crack sealing to $10,000 or $30,000 and above for pier installation or slab jacking, depending on soil, access and severity. Catching a drainage or plumbing problem early, while it is still a moisture pattern and not structural movement, is by far the cheapest outcome, which is the entire point of continuous monitoring.
Usually not when the cause is expansive clay soil movement, settling or poor drainage, because those are typically excluded. Sudden damage from a covered event, such as an accidental plumbing burst under the slab, may be covered. Either way, a timestamped moisture history and documented alerts give you and your adjuster a clear record of what changed and when.
During dry spells, keeping the soil around a slab evenly moist prevents the shrink and swell cycle that cracks foundations, but soaking one side is just as harmful. The watering planner uses your sensors plus local weather to tell you which sides need water, when to skip because rain is coming, and where the ground is already too wet.
Wireless soil probes read moisture, temperature and conductivity about a foot down at each corner and plumbing zone. When one area stays wet after the rest has dried, rises with no rain, or dries far faster than its neighbors, that imbalance is the early signal of drainage, plumbing or drought stress, long before the slab moves enough to crack the house.
Register your property, tell us where it is, and we will confirm whether we can install in your area or put you on the list.
Registrations are approved by hand while we are in early access, so expect an email from a person rather than an instant login.
If you would rather ask before registering, email hello@moisturepilot.com and a person from Motmot answers.
We install and monitor inside the Motmot Foundation Repair service area in Texas. The exact county and city list is being published here. Register from anywhere and we will tell you plainly whether we can reach you.
The hardware warranty term and return window are being finalised and will be published here before ordering opens. We are not asking anyone to buy until they are.