Eve
About the vendor and its products
After having originally been called Elgato and using the brand name Eve, the company has now been renamed Eve Systems. After some changes in branding, the smart home products are now labeled Eve Home. Here, we find some different categories of products (with new ones continuously being added):
Devices for climate monitoring and control, like Eve Room, Eve Degree and Eve Thermo
Lighting products, like the light sources Eve Flare and Eve Lightstrip
Products for controlling lights (and other types of systems), like the switch Eve Light Switch, the smart plug Eve Energy, the smart power strip Eve Energy Strip, and the wireless Eve Button
Different types of sensors, like Eve Motion, Eve Door & Window, and Eve Smoke
Smart shades, Eve MotionBlinds, which can also be complemented by a switch for these, Eve Shutter Switch
Solution for controlling garden watering, Eve Aqua
A Bluetooth extender, Eve Extend, that can expand the range of a Bluetooth network
Eve Water Guard, a product that monitors the house to detect water leaks. In contrast to traditional leak sensors, which only perform spot detection, the attached 2 m sensor (can be expanded) allows monitoring a larger area
Eve Cam, an indoor security camera said to be the first designed from scratch to support HomeKit Secure Video
As I have mentioned several places when describing our installed solutions, there is also an Eve app, which in some areas offers richer functionality than most other similar apps, including the Home app. This is especially true in the area of more advanced programming based on the logic of trigger-condition-action.
Our experiences
In our house, we have had several Eve products, see more specific experiences in the table below, but for various reasons they have all been replaced by other products. Generally, we have been quite satisfied with Eve, though, and I have had much utility from the sometimes unique opportunities offered by the eve app.
Notice that on phones, the table might only display in landscape mode
| Component | Room | Experiences |
|---|---|---|
Eve Energy smart plug x 3 |
Uninstalled |
The experiences with these smart plugs were generally good and they offer power consumption information. However, after some time, they started to be less reliable and would need restarting. They were therefore uninstalled. |
Door and window sensor |
Uninstalled |
As for the door sensor, we had more issues with this becoming unavailable, but I suspect this was due to its initial location being in the outdoor shed (this device uses Bluetooth for communication). It has therefore been removed. |
Weather sensor |
Uninstalled |
This is in principle a good multi sensor, but after some time, one of the pins on the battery lid broke. This made it very hard to get the lid to stay closed so it would lose power. |