Concrete Moisture Meters and Test Kits

Concrete Moisture Meters for Slab Testing Before Flooring

Surface Meter or In-Situ RH Test: Which Does Your Floor Need?

Concrete moisture meters come in two kinds, and plenty of flooring jobs use both. A handheld surface meter scans the slab and shows where the wet areas are. An in-situ relative humidity test measures conditions inside the slab, from a sensor set in a drilled hole.

The Orion C555 is the surface option. It reads moisture 0.5 in into smooth, firm concrete, gypsum cement and other floor slabs and screeds, with no drilling. Its built-in ambient temperature, humidity and dew point sensors and the paired On-Demand Calibrator cover the preliminary comparative evaluation in ASTM F2659 for comparative moisture condition of concrete. Concrete readings run from 0.1 to 6.9, and a relative mode on a 0-100 scale handles concrete block and similar materials. It is not calibrated for wood. Use it to find the problem areas and decide where the RH sensors go.

Rapid RH L6 is the in-situ method. You drill a test hole, install an L6 Smart Sensor and read it after 24 hours of sensor acclimation, following ASTM F2170 for relative humidity in concrete floor slabs. Each Smart Sensor carries its own factory calibration, so the Total Reader needs no periodic calibration. The Total Reader takes the reading on contact, records concrete RH, temperature and ambient conditions together, and sends the data over Bluetooth to the free DataMaster L6 app, which builds PDF reports on your phone.

Which Rapid RH L6 Kit Fits Your Jobs?

Every kit here comes in a Fahrenheit or Celsius version. The Smart Sensor 5-Pack with Total Reader is the smallest set: one reader, five sensors, extensions, caps, covers and a floor map. It also works as a refill for a starter kit. The Starter Kit+ is a complete concrete moisture test kit. It adds two Smart Logger V2 ambient recorders, the insertion tool, a 3/4 in SDS masonry drill bit, a wire cleaning brush, a vacuum attachment and a carrying case.

The larger kits start from the Starter Kit+ and come in a hard-shell ABS case. The WFP350+ adds five Bluetooth DataGrabbers. These snap onto the sensors, log time-stamped readings at an interval you set and upload them to the app. The CFP405+ adds a C555 concrete moisture meter and an infrared thermometer, and the CFP415+ adds DataGrabbers on top of that. If you check wood as well as slabs, look at the WFP400+, which adds an Orion 950 pinless wood meter and an infrared thermometer, or the WFP450+, which includes DataGrabbers too.

The True Remote Monitoring kit is for jobs you can't visit every day. It pairs a sensor pack and DataGrabbers with range extenders that sit on the slab and send concrete RH and temperature to a cloud database over the cellular network. It needs a jobsite conditions sensor that is sold separately, and it works in the United States wherever cellular service is available. The Total Reader is also sold on its own.

Related: Pinless Wood Moisture Meters · Wagner Moisture Meters · Water Damage Restoration

How Long Does an ASTM F2170 RH Test Take?

An L6 Smart Sensor is ready to read after 24 hours of sensor acclimation, so plan a day between drilling and the first reading. A concrete moisture meter like the C555 reads on the spot without a test hole, which is why crews often scan first and place sensors second. While you wait, Smart Logger V2 recorders log ambient temperature and RH, store up to 16,384 readings and send them to the free Wagner Sentry app over Bluetooth 5.0. DataGrabbers keep logging after the first reading, and the Extraction Tool pulls them out so you can reuse them on the next slab.