LifeFuels smart water bottle review

REVIEW – Do you drink enough during the day? Let me rephrase that, do you drink enough healthy fluids each day? And on, Diet Coke is not a healthy fluid. If you’re not a fan of drinking plain water, the LifeFuels smart water bottle along with specially designed FuelPods may help. Let’s find out.

What is it?

LifeFuels is a combination of a smart water bottle, an app, and small bottles of flavor drops called FuelPods.

What’s in the box?

• LifeFuels smart water bottle
• 3 FuelPods
• USB charging cable
• USB AC adapter
• Cleaning sponge

Design and features

The LifeFuels bottle has a black anodized aluminum base and a 16.9 fl ounce (500 ml) plastic bottle that screws into the base.

There’s a button on the front that is used to select the desired FuelPod and dispense it into the bottle of water when you long press the button.

The backside of the base has a micro USB connector that is used to charge the LifeFuels bottle. You’ll also notice an attached webbed handle. If you’re wondering why you would want a handle for your water bottle, the LifeFuels bottle is pretty bulky and heavy compared to a typical water bottle. The base is also too wide to fit in a vehicle cup holder – at least it didn’t fit in my MINI Cooper’s cup holders.

As mentioned earlier, the plastic bottle part of the LifeFuels unscrews from the base so you can wash it. The thing is that you can’t really wash the base very well because it has electronics. You can wipe it off, but it’s tough to do a thorough cleaning with soap.

There’s a cover on the bottom of the base that unscrews to reveal the slots for 3 FuelPods and the power/reset button.

The first thing you’ll want to do before you start using the LifeFuels bottom is to charge it. You do that by using the included micro USB cable. While it’s charging, the base will glow orange.

When charging has completed, the status LED on the base will glow green. You’re going to become familiar with the charging process because the LifeFuels bottle only has a 4 day battery life. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to worry about if my water bottle is charged in order to be able to use it. But let’s go ahead and move on.

The news step to using this smart water bottle is to insert the FuelPods into the base. There are a variety of flavors to choose from and each flavor provides a health benefit like vitamins, energy, electrolytes, etc.

The FuelPods are packaged in plastic with a cap on top. Each pod provides 30 beverages.

They insert easily into the base and are locked in place with a twist.

App

The last step you’ll need to do is to install the LifeFuels mobile app on your phone or tablet. This app will let you keep track of your fluid intake and is supposed to remind you when to drink. The alerts never worked on my Huawei P30 Pro, but the app did keep track of how many servings were left for each FuelPod and how many times I’d used the bottle each day. Is this useful, I guess to the extent that it lets me know that the pods are almost empty so there won’t be surprised. Other than that, nope, not really useful.

Taste and value

I was sent Peach, Blackberry Acai, and Lemon Lime FuelPods. The Peach provides multi-vitamins, the Blackberry Acai provides some antioxidants and the Lemon Lime flavor provides electrolytes. As far as taste, they all tasted fine and were not overly sweet as they use stevia as a sweetener. Thumbs up for that. However, at $11.99 each, I feel that they are too expensive.

Then we come to the value of the LifeFuels smart bottle itself. This water bottle has a list price of $179. I find that to be insanely expensive especially since the bottle’s battery lasts less than a week before it needs to be recharged. As an example, I fully charged the bottle on a Tuesday late afternoon, used it for 4 or FuelPod servings, and it was dead the following Monday morning.

What I like

• Nothing

What I’d change

• Drastically improve battery life
• Bottle is too expensive
• FuelPods are too expensive
• A pain to clean

Final thoughts

Here’s some advice for you if you’re thinking about buying the LifeFuels smart water bottle. Although it’s a nice bottle with some high tech features, it’s way too expensive. Save yourself a ton of money and use your existing water bottle or buy an insulated one online. Then drink regular plain water or dress it up with some flavor drops like the ones you can find on Amazon. Those drops might not have vitamins, but you can buy a bottle of multi-vitamins at your local grocery store or pharmacy and you’ll probably have spent less than $25 for everything. Much less if you already have a bottle.

I love gadgets as much as all of you do, but this is a gadget that solves no real problem or need. Sorry LifeFuels.

Price: $179 for the bottle, $11.99 for the FuelPods
Where to buy: LifeFuels
Source: The sample for this review was provided by LifeFuels.