Eve Extend, Energy, Motion and Door & Window sensors review

REVIEW – At this point, my home is ran in part by us two humans as much as it is with Eve’s products. When the Extend and Energy accessories came up for review, I jumped all over it as I knew they were products that I could easily incorporate into our evolving automated home. To my surprise, the company also included a Door & Window monitor and a Motion sensor.

What is it?

Extend – a Bluetooth extender module used to amplify the Bluetooth range of the Eve products.

Energy – a plug-in outlet and power meter

Door & Window – a contact sensor to put on the door or window frame to give security notices and monitor usage

Motion – a wireless motion detector

All of these accessories are compatible and easily integrated into the EVE mobile app – as well as Apple HomeKit, although the HomeKit is not required for use.

What’s in the box?

Each box contains the following, in general:

• Accessory unit
• Mounting/Install Hardware
• Batteries (as applicable) or power cord
• Instruction manuals

Design and features

Each of these works a bit differently, so I’ll tackle them one by one!

EXTEND – Pretty straight forward, the Extend takes the Bluetooth connection that operates these units and amplifies it to provide greater coverage. As you can see, it displays each unit connect to the Extend and gives you the connection status. It’s easy to add to the Eve mobile app, and then add your Eve items to the Extend. Small and compact, it sits out of the way and does its job. Setup is a breeze.

ENERGY – I used this one to plug in our reading lamp in the bedroom. Again, setup is a breeze, just add the unit to your Eve app via scanning the product code on the unit and then plug it in. It provides quite a bit of data, and since it is incorporated into HomeKit I can also tell Siri to turn it on remotely when we’re getting ready to head to bed. You can set a schedule as well if you want to help use it as a security feature with your home to turn on/off lights to give the impression that someone is home.

DOOR & WINDOW – We installed this on the front door – simply install using the provided 3M stickers and install kit to ensure that the sensor on the door lines up appropriately with the sensor on the door frame.

The sensor keeps track of how many times it’s been opened, how long it remained open and gives you historical charts to be able to take a glance at that data. This would be ideal to me if you were a parent and wanted to insure your kids made it home, as it gives a phone notification with each opening and closing of the door – and as just a simple security device to see if anyone is entering said door or window when you’re not home. It’s the type of active monitoring that I like with push notifications in real time.

MOTION – We placed this in the one room in our house that would be a prime spot for would be thieves but which we don’t have a lot of security measures – and it has helped give us some peace of mind, as it’s great at picking up motion and providing the push alerts. Usually, it’s just us going through that room, so it will definitely cause us some alarm if we get a notification that there is motion in that room!

Again, you can look at the history to evaluate anything out of the ordinary.

Performance

I couldn’t be happier with the performance of each of these units. The biggest thing we have noticed is how the addition of the Extend has helped our other Eve products perform better. The Eve power stripe that I reviewed a few months back had started to get a bit glitchy – only responding occasionally and sometimes refusing to turn things on or off. After incorporating the Extend, it hasn’t had a failure to perform as requested. All the other accessories have performed exactly as expected.

What I like

• Very easy incorporation to HomeKit and existing Eve set-up. Can’t stress this enough, they make it VERY simple.
• Added security with the Door & Window sensor as well as the Motion sensor.
• Energy and usage data is very helpful and presented in a way to help you either evaluate the historical data or identify trends.

What I would change

• About my only frustration is that these are all packaged individually. It would be great for Eve to start bundling some of these together in some type of “Security” package or something of the like. Continuing to pick these items up one-by-one can really drive up the cost, especially if you’re looking to outfit a bunch of window and doors with the sensors. EDIT: I did notice while researching the pricing, that there are some small bundles online where you can get the Motion and Energy in a bundle for $81.91 on Amazon.

Final thoughts

Overall, I continue to give Eve high marks as I love their products. They are very useful, easy to install and set up, and don’t require heavy IT knowledge by any means to get them to work on your phone. They provide automation, home security features and make life a little bit easier with each new item they introduce. Whether you already have some of their products, or if any of these would be your first product in their line I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Price: $49.95 for the Extend – $49.95 for the Energy – $39.95 for the Door & Window and $49.95 for the Motion.
Where to buy: EVE Store and Amazon
Source: The sample of this product was provided by EVE.