This £3 watering indicator from Amazon is helping me keep my houseplants alive – even during the hot weather!

If, like me, you struggle to work out how much water your houseplants need, one simple tool can make a world of difference: a watering indicator.

Westland’s Watering Indicator is on sale at Amazon for just £3; it’s an absolute steal. It’s simple by design and nothing groundbreaking, but at that price, I had to try it for myself. I used my indicator to work out how often I should be watering my monstera, and so far, it’s done a brilliant job of telling me when my plant is thirsty.

Here’s how it works...

The design of the Westland Watering Indicator is really simple – it’s a green plastic stick with an indicator window on the end. You just need to push the tip of the green stick into the soil, near the rootball, so that the indicator (and part of the stick) is visible above the surface. The instructions warn against twisting or pulling the stick out once it’s in place so that you don’t disrupt the results.

Straight out of the packet, the watering indicator is red, and that’s the colour it stays whenever your plant needs watering. Sure enough, when I first put the indicator in my monstera’s soil, it stayed red, so I knew it was time to water it.

It’s important to wait two hours after you first insert the indicator, though, because that’s how long it takes for the indicator to turn blue – and you don’t want to jump the gun and end up learning how to save an overwatered plant!

Once I’d watered my monstera, it took a couple of hours for the indicator to turn blue. To begin with, a blue line appeared along the middle of the red, and I think that reflects some of the more sceptical reviews that the indicator is unreliable or misleading. After a few hours, though, the indicator was almost entirely blue, and by the following morning, any remaining red had disappeared.

So, maybe it doesn’t always live up to the two-hour update mentioned on the instructions – but for £3 and a few extra hours of waiting, I think it’s still a pretty good investment. Sure enough, after a week of the hot weather we’ve been experiencing recently, the indicator began to turn red again.

I want to give it a few more cycles to really make sure it’s reliable long-term – Westland recommends replacing the stick every 12 to 18 months, so it should have a fair length of service ahead – but so far, I’m impressed.

The only thing I would be wary of is the fact that houseplants have varying water requirements – so even if you know the best time of day to water houseplants, the amount of water a peace lily needs is vastly different to a succulent's preferences, for example.

If you’re looking for more specialised care, it’s worth going for a smart houseplant monitor like the Elho Smart Pebble, which I reviewed earlier this year. It uses a database containing information about virtually every type of houseplant out there, providing watering, feeding, light and temperature suggestions based on the variety you have.

That said, Westland's watering indicator offers brilliant bang-for-buck for the majority of houseplants, and at just £3, it's a lot cheaper than a smart monitor!

You can use it all year round, but it’s worth the investment tenfold right now, with the hot weather leaving our plants thirstier than ever. It’ll make watering during the winter months easier, too, because over- and under-watering are among the most common winter houseplant problems.

If you're looking for an affordable way to take the guesswork out of watering, Westland's watering indicator is worth a shot. It's simple, cheap, and does what it says on the tin.