Hey Guys! Springtime is here. Today we're gonna check out one of the only HomeKit
enabled water controllers out there on the market. The Eva Aqua! Today's video is a part
of my HomeKit series and for full disclosure Eve did send this out to me
for a full honest review. Now, like I mentioned this does work with Apple's
Homekit if you're into lady A aka {Alexa} or Google home unfortunately this will not
work for you. There's other water controllers out there on the market I'll
actually leave a link to one that I reviewed up there that works withLady A.
Now one thing about Eve Products, if you've never heard of Eve, is they make some
great products that are designed specifically for a home kit but 90% of
their products are bluetooth so you will only have that 30 to maybe 40 foot range
but there's ways to extend that. They have the eve extend which Eve was nice
enough to send me one of this also I'll quickly go over this as I set up the Eve
aqua only because I did have issues with connection and I had no choice but to
use the Eve extend so definitely stay tuned to the end of the video and I'll show
you how I quickly set that up. Inside the box you'll have a Quick Connect and two
double-a batteries which is really nice that they include those. The actual unit
is aluminum with this black plastic it looks and feels great. It does have a
battery compartment at the bottom which is a little tricky to open up. I noticed
some other reviewers had trouble opening this up but personally I just did it in
like two seconds and no issues whatsoever. It's a tight squeeze with the
batteries but once you figure out how to do it it's quite easy I think. On the
very front you do have one single button that's going to turn on and off the
water manually now you can disable that button which I'll talk more about in the
app in just a couple minutes and this is designed to go on to any standard u.s.
hose Bibb fairly simple just like any other hose attachment. once that's done
let's go ahead and connect this to the even homekit apps but you can do by
skinning the QR code in either of those apps go ahead assign a name to the
device and a room now personally I have a
a yard as a room with additional lights after some thought I realized I probably
don't want to have this type of device in a room attached to other lights
because if I say hey turn on the backyard not only is it gonna turn on
lights but it's also going to turn on the water controller I don't want to do
that so after giving it some thought I created another room called water spigot
that way I don't accidentally turn it on when I'm trying to just turn on the
backyard lights and that's it we're all set up you can hit the on button in the
evap and turn right on you see how easy this but remember this is outside so
from the inside you're not going to hear that noise you can see how responsive
this is as soon as I hit the on button it's pretty much going to turn on but
remember this is Bluetooth awfully close this I did have issues with the
Bluetooth range which I'll talk now about vomit
as you can see here you can use it with evap the home kit app and also Siri
turn on the back yard hose now of course you can use the automations within home
kit to automate the watering but that's just too tedious I highly recommend that
you use the scheduling within the evap the only good setting within the home
kit is the run time so if you do turn it on with home kit or serie your default
to a specific run time so you're not over watering by accent but right now
let's go ahead and jump back into the evap because that's where all the magic
really happens which by the way is the best free home kit app available on the
market today there's other ones that you can pay for but this is free and it is
one of the best so definitely check it out even if you don't have any products
now the first thing you want to do is update the firmware so you get all the
great features in the basic settings you have flow rate for the water consumption
now the way they do this is not by hardware there's no meter within beat
eve aqua all they're doing is taking the time the water is running times in
whatever you put into this flow rate unfortunately most people are not gonna
know what their household flow rate is most people are not gonna go out and go
get a meter but according to Google the average household flow rate is six to
twelve gallons per minute but to be honest at the price that you pay for
this eve aqua I expect a real water consumption meter with built in tip
advice and then also within the basic features is a child lock which disables
that physical button on device so kids can't play with it in the general
settings you have the on/off button this schedule how long it's been watering for
the default duration which is same thing as the home kit one but for the evap and
then the s make assumption which is based off of that flow rate which i
talked about earlier but the magic is in this schedule and I gotta tell you here
is where you want to spend most of your time in the scheduling where you can
schedule up to seven different times per day to water and base those factors off
of sunset and sundown and you can have one for each day of the week if you want
to but you can only use each day once you've also created some
pension scenes for homekit so if you know is gonna rain you can actually hit
these scenes within the home kit and delay the watering either today or today
and tomorrow but unfortunately these are manual scenes they are not based on
through your current weather or weather that's going to be coming you have to
know the weather and activate the scene manually now if you want you can create
a shortcut within iOS to check the weather and the precipitation if it's
above a certain percentage for instance here I put 80 percent it automatically
add that scene to stop the watering now unfortunately shortcuts are not
automatic either you can create an automation to run that shortcut a
specific time which will pop up a notification but you still have to hit
run afford to check the weather and then it will automatically apply the scene
for you I wish Eve would have some type of system to check the weather within
the app automatically based off your location and automatically put that
scene in for you as other water controllers already have that feature
but that's just me being super picky overall this is a great device the only
complaint that I've truly have is that is Bluetooth and unfortunately because
my walls in the basement are brick it really did not have a good signal from
my Apple TV home kit hub which is on the third level so I had no choice but to
use the eve extend which was super easy to set up and actually it's quite nice
to use to do so it's just like any other home kiss that's where you go ahead go
into the evap scan the QR code and I want our matically add it and then
search out for other Eve Bluetooth devices you can select which ones you
want to connect to the hub based off of the Bluetooth
strength level in the app if you quickly stopped here by the way you can see the
backyard hose which is the Eve aqua device only has two bars and if you take
a look I'm only about 10 feet away now the thing is it does go through the
exterior wall which is gonna cut down now on that Bluetooth signal and because
of that I'm going to say most people who use the Eve awkward device are also
going to need extend unless for some reason your
homekit hub is very close to the eve aqua on the other side of the wall so I
gotta say I've been using this for a couple weeks now and honestly this thing
hasn't worked great my only concern was that connection I had issues with only
because my homekit hub is all the way upstairs and mice pickets all the way
downstairs plus it's through a brick wall so I had no choice but to use the
eave extend it's a little bit expensive for what it is but overall I really
really like this so if you guys have any questions definitely leave them down
below check out my full pros and cons list on my website if you guys want to
see the next video in my home kit series click right there and if you're brand
new here I hope you were consider subscribing by pressing that blue circle
and I will see you on next video thanks for watching