Floor Sentry Best Practices

Learn about Floor Sentry, the embedded wood floor data loggerIf you’re curious to learn more about our Floor Sentry® system, we’ve put together this best practices checklist for you.

A beautiful wood floor is a significant investment, and the last thing you want is for moisture problems to ruin it. Floor Sentry protects that investment by continuously monitoring the conditions that can cause a wood floor to fail, so you can enjoy your floor with peace of mind for years to come.

We’ll cover Floor Sentry’s features after the checklist.

Getting Started and Installing Floor Sentry Devices

1. Download the free Wagner Sentry® app to your Bluetooth®-enabled mobile device. We’ll cover how to use the app in a separate checklist below.

2. Install the Floor Sentry device in a plank of the flooring that will go over the subfloor.

  • Use the installation template that comes with Floor Sentry as a guide to rout a cavity in the underside of a wood flooring plank. Rout from the middle of the board, not from the side. The manual lists the minimum cavity size and the router bit to use.
  • After routing the cavity, clean out any sawdust and debris so the device sits cleanly and seals well.
  • Dry fit the Floor Sentry in the cavity to make sure it fits.
  • Remove the release liner from the butyl seal on the Floor Sentry and install it in the cavity with the butyl seal facing the wood floor plank.
  • When you install the plank, make sure no adhesive or other materials cover the underside of the Floor Sentry, since its sensors read through both faces of the device.

That’s it for installation. To read the data from your Floor Sentry devices, you’ll use the Wagner Sentry app, so on to that checklist.

Using the Wagner Sentry App

1. Worth repeating: make sure your mobile device’s Bluetooth is turned on.

2. Configure the app settings, such as time format and temperature unit (Fahrenheit or Celsius).

3. Set up a new Floor Sentry device in the app:

  • Name the device. We recommend a naming convention that makes sense to you and that you can use on all your projects. For example, you might name each device by family name and room (e.g., “Johnson Kitchen”).
  • Configure the device settings, such as reading frequency and the alarm thresholds for both sensors. You can set an acceptable range for RH and temperature, or keep the defaults. When you’re within Bluetooth range, the Wagner Sentry app will alert you if the device records a reading outside any of these ranges.

4. Sync the data stored on a device:

  • Open the Wagner Sentry app. You should see your Floor Sentry device. If you don’t, you’re probably out of Bluetooth range, so walk around the area until the device name appears.
  • Select the device and use “Refresh Data” to sync its latest readings to the app.

5. Use the data displays in the Wagner Sentry app:

  • When you select a device, the app shows its latest RH and temperature readings. The top sensor’s readings appear in the blue box, and the bottom sensor’s readings are in the green box.
  • The app also shows a graph of the synced data, with separate trend lines for top RH, bottom RH, top temperature, and bottom temperature. The color of each line matches its toggle button above the graph.
  • You can show the RH and temperature data for both sensors on the graph, or just the top or bottom sensor.
  • Generate a PDF report of the RH and temperature data to share with others. Just select the date range you want to include.

6. When Wagner Meters releases updated Floor Sentry firmware, you can install it on your devices through the app using Bluetooth.

With the Wagner Sentry app, the floor owner can monitor conditions in the wood floor and subfloor and get automatic alerts, when they’re within Bluetooth range, if conditions go outside the alarm thresholds. The goal is to catch changes before they can cause serious damage to the floor.

Summary of Floor Sentry Features

  • Compact, thin device with two sensors: one reads RH and temperature in the wood, and the other reads them at the subfloor.
  • Installation template helps make sure the routed cavity is the right size for the device.
  • The free Wagner Sentry app manages the devices and connects to them from any Bluetooth-enabled device running the app.
  • The app sends an alert if a device records an RH or temperature reading outside the alarm thresholds set for it.
  • Each device stores up to 16,384 readings.
  • Each device has a pre-installed battery that can last up to 8 years, depending on how often it logs readings.
  • It comes with a 1-year warranty.

Floor Sentry is an easy-to-install, easy-to-use data logger that gives wood floors a lot of protection. You know how much damage excess moisture can do to hardwood floors. You already try to teach homeowners how to care for their floors, and now you can give them a tool to do it. With Floor Sentry quietly taking regular readings, it helps protect the floor, the homeowner’s investment, and your reputation.

The Wagner Sentry app alerts the homeowner if conditions go out of range, so they can act before a bigger, more expensive problem develops. And it gives you a consistent data record to help find what caused any change in conditions. Floor Sentry offers peace of mind for everyone.

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Last updated on October 12th, 2026

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