this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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sort of tangential, but this discussion reminds me of a recent conversation. we had a plumbing leak recently so we had to have these water damage mitigation guys come out and check all the floors and drywall and figure out what needs to get replaced, yada yada. and they've all got these things they call "moisture meters" which are little black plastic boxes with a digital display on the front, and you hold it against a surface and it shows a number that somehow indicates how much water is absorbed into the material. so I asked one of these guys "hey, how does that work? like what's it actually measuring?" and he gave a response that sounded in tone like a technical explanation, but the actual information essentially boiled down to "it tells you how much water is in there, and if it's above 20 it's bad." and I'm thinking like, yeah, I got that, I figured that out from hearing you call it a "moisture meter" and watching you use it for ten seconds. is that what you thought I was confused about? obviously I mean like, what quantity does the number represent; what are the units; what physical thing is being measured to generate that number; is it based on a physical property, a thermal property, chemical, electrical; you're using it the same on wood, drywall, carpet, insulation, how does it apparently treat all materials the same when they have different physical properties and absorb, hold, and release water in different ways? it just baffled me that I could have all these questions less than a minute after seeing one for the first time, but this guy who uses one professionally every day only needs to know water>20=bad
I once was doing some it support trainee work on some education facility. Their old it manager retired while i was there and whole it support thing was outsourced to some external company. They probably knew their shit well enough but still i had to explain some things about office 365 to them (i hadnt even used 365 properly before that ) and i felt that i knew some things better than them. Yet they were the ones getting paid.
They were probably better qualified to do the job in general, but still in my opinion some random trainee shouldnt know more about anything than PAID professional who is supposed to take care of everything. Though I also head from them that they are quite well worked and have to work on MANY sites and basically are not allowed to make mistakes, so maybe there was that too. Seemed really stressful to work for that company.
Spent a few minutes researching because I was almost sure it was just measuring resistance but that is different depending on materials.
They measure moisture by using a scale of wood equivalent moisture. Basically no matter what you stick it in, the pins measure resistance across the probes and give a number as an equivalent reading for sticking them in wood that is wet. Apparently wood is pretty consistent about resistance regardless ofof what type of wood it is. And since American houses are primarily made of wood, we only care about how wet the wood in a home could be.
That's pretty cool. Doesn't work on drywall or anything else though it sounds like
No it does work on drywall.
Water will spread until it reaches equilibrium. So if drywall is tested and shows 20% then the wood directly attached to it is likely at 20% moisture content as well.
Kind of a genius little device, honestly.
Shouldn't that be the other way around? You can make the extrapolation from the (more accurate) reading of the wood to the materials around it, but not from other materials back to wood. If the resistance of wet drywall is equivalent to that of wood at 20% moisture, I'd think that the drywall is a lot wetter? And using the device on a steel beam might show some insane percentage when we know steel does not absorb water.
Someone should make a specialised tools community like Reddit's. Would be a good fit there
Ignore that guy. I agree, that sounds like black magic fuckery and I need an explanation.