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Crop Steering
Live demo

Check if Crop Steering suits your grow

Answer six yes/no questions. Each “no” shows what you would need to change.

Fit check questions

Your answers stay on this page. Nothing is sent or saved.

1.Do you grow in containers, with plants grouped into zones on one valve each?

If no: Crop Steering is built for container growing by zone. It is not designed for soil beds or field irrigation.

2.Do you run Home Assistant, or are you willing to set it up?

If no: Crop Steering runs inside Home Assistant. The grow-controller tutorial shows how to set one up from scratch. Build a grow controller (new to Home Assistant)

3.Can Home Assistant switch each zone's valve (and your pump, if you have one)?

If no: You need a switch or valve entity per zone. See the hardware guide. Hardware guide

4.Do you have, or plan to fit, at least one moisture probe per zone that Home Assistant can read in % or m³/m³?

If no: Without a probe a zone can only run on a timer. Watering by substrate moisture needs a probe reading.

5.Will your physical safety stop the water without software: valves that close on power loss, and a float switch or timer on the pump?

If no: Fit these first. The software is not an emergency stop. Your responsibilities

6.Are you comfortable running self-hosted, open-source software, and testing on one zone before a whole room?

If no: There is no vendor support contract. Help is through GitHub issues. Get help

Room size, substrates and plumbing

Terms used here: zone, shot, P1, pore EC. Full glossary

Size is counted in zones, not floor area. A room can have up to 24 zones, each with its own valve and probes. The controller opens one zone at a time, so the number of zones and the length of each shot set how fast a room can be watered. Pump sharing lets zones take turns when one pump cannot feed them all.

How long it takes to water every zone once

One pass over every zone: 12 min. All P1 shots: 1 h 12 min.

Zones × shot length, then × shots. That is water-flowing time only: the gaps the controller leaves between shots, and any zone waiting for a shared pump, come on top. Compare it with how long your P1 window is.

Substrate: choose generic, stone wool or coco in setup. Stone wool and coco give starting targets; with coco the controller waits 60 minutes after a shot before trusting a pore EC reading. Substrate calibration curves are on the roadmap.

Drainage: free-drain or flood table. On a flood table the controller watches for a zone whose moisture rises with no water.

Water supply and pump sharing

What Crop Steering does and does not do

Crop Steering handles irrigation and fertigation. It reads substrate moisture and EC, decides when and how much to water each zone (P0 to P3), and runs the pumps, valves and dosing pumps. It is not a farm-management platform.

Areas left to the tools built for them, and how Crop Steering connects
AreaHow Crop Steering connects
Users and rolesHome Assistant's own users. Configuration saves need an administrator, and the change history records who made each change.
TasksAlerts, Repairs cards and the Upgrade report carry error codes that another tool can turn into tasks.
Compliance recordsThe change history, run records, harvests and water totals. Charted history and run details can be exported today; a full export is on the roadmap.
ClimateLights and HVAC are read as inputs; hold switches can pause watering. Crop Steering does not drive climate equipment.

The roadmap Safety

Minimum hardware to buy

One switch or valve and one moisture probe per zone, on a Home Assistant host. Everything else is optional.

Minimum setup for one zone Build a grow controller (new to Home Assistant)