Garden Box Drip Watering Kit with B-Hyve Smart Hose Faucet Timer and Wi-Fi Hub

The Orbit Garden Box Drip Watering Kit with B-Hyve Smart Hose Faucet Timer and Wi-Fi Hub is an excellent watering system. Its diagram shows a configuration for a standard above ground box garden, but with 50 feet of 1/2 inch tubing and 50 feet of 1/4 inch tubing, you can make a tailored configuration to meet your garden needs. Orbital makes a quality product and this set is very complete. It even has tubing cutters, something other kits never provide. My only adjustment was to not use the wi-fi hub timer. I prefer the Orbit digital timer. But if you enjoy turning the faucet on from a phone application, go for it. The range was not significant for more than from inside the house. But the couplings, drip lock tees, elbows and the faucet adapter were very easy to install. This is a great and complete set for drip watering.

I have 4 raised beds that are 4’x8’. I got this irrigation system to water it all. It came with most of what it needed and it was easy to add and make a different configuration. The connections were easy to make, the individual lines were easy to cut with the cutters provided. I was able to make all the lines. The remote wi-fi was easy to setup, the timer works well. This will water all my vegetables economically and easy to control. We have irrigation on my small fruit with great results, this will give me the same results on my vegetables. Needs stakes to hold small lines in place Good product

This is a really innovative concept, but I feel that B-Hyve got a little tripped up in rolling out this particular product package, as it's less than the sum of its parts. First, you get the "tech" side of the product: a Wifi-to-Bluetooth adapter, which plugs into an outlet, plus the Bluetooth-based hose timer, which communicates with the adapter. This two-part solution gets around the fact that WiFi is too power-hungry to run off of AA batteries, which is what the outdoor timer uses. Bluetooth, on the other hand, is very efficient, so when you program your timer via your smartphone, it connects to the adapter plugged into the wall via WiFi, and then sends the commands to the timer via Bluetooth. This is all very cool, and a great product. The issue is that this package just isn't versatile enough - it is definitely for a garden box and nothing else. Although I have a garden box and thought I might use this product for it, once I saw how it worked, it just seemed a bit complicated, and furthermore, my garden box is too far from the faucet. While the B-Hyve comes with 50 feet of tubing, you need to use some of this tubing to create your garden box watering grid with the included drip line, so in reality it's a lot shorter than that. Also odd is how stiff the tubing is - I found that it kinked easily, while at the same time being pretty hard to string through my yard. It's not a hose in the traditional sense, but rather hard plastic tubing. The worst part of it all is that B-Hyve didn't include the one obvious part that would make this 1000x more versatile - an end cap to terminate the tubing. Instead, you must actually cut it up and make it into a loop, and this is just artificially limiting. I really like the concept, and the tech seems fantastic (including smart watering based on climate, geography, and your particular plants). But I just can't recommend this package, as it will end up not working for a lot of people. As it stands, I may add a 50-foot hose in between the timer and tubing in order to get the irrigation system to reach my garden box, or alternatively I'll try to rig it up in a way that B-Hyve clearly hasn't though of - to actually use as a traditional drip line in a linear fashion.

Very convenient and well thought out setup. I have been very impressed by this system and how easily it works. I installed it in two new raised planters and have been very pleased. The kit has everything you need to set up a small area. Included in the Kit: ½”x50’ Distribution Tubing, ¼”x50’ soaker line, one T compression fitting, four compression elbows, a ton of cinching push-in plugs to that connect the distribution line to the soaker hose, a tubing cutter (pretty nice too), the wifireceiver, the control box, and instructions. I really like the design because you feed the soaker lines back into the distribution line, which limits wasted water and maintains more pressure. It takes longer to set up but I am very happy with how it works. It irrigates the planters well and only uses a fraction of the water I would use watering by hand. We set up the system the same as the instruction and it works great. I’m in the process of adding to the system by adding lines that will water hanging plants and other beds but using the same wifimodule Compression Fittings – the tubing slips into these easily and do not come apart and are much better than the ones stocked in the store. These slide together first time with minimal force. Cinching Push-In Plugs – push through the side-wall of the distribution line easily and then cinch around so that it cannot come off. Very secure and robust design. The soaker hose cannot come off of this, I tried and the bard holds no matter what. You will rip the soaker line before the barb lets go of the line. Mobile App – very easy to set up and manage your irrigation. You can create custom watering cycles, add new zones with different wifi hubs and control it all from your phone. You can also manually water from the app or directly from the box connected to the hose. It gives you notifications when it is donewatering. If you know the moisture of your soil the system will water based on that which is amazing and conserves even more water. Tubing Cutter – I thought I would have to buy one for this but it came with a cutter for ¼” and ½” tubing and it cuts nicely. I first rolled out the distribution line. I snaked it under a raised deck platform so that my kids do not play with it or trip over it. I then snaked it into the backside of the planter, but the line and put the first T in. Then I connected a big rectangle using the elbows around the outer edge of the planter box (outer edge of the inside area). Once the tubing connected back to itself I laid out where I wanted to soaker lines, pushed the cinching push-in plugs in and connected the soaker lines. I have them running across the width of the planter so that the lines are not longerand I keep as much water pressure as I can. Once all this was done I connected the box to the hose, put in batteries, and did a test of the system. Once that worked I set up the app and the wifi portion. There are some left-over plugs, some distribution line, and about 20’ of soaker line. But this allows me to expand and continue building onto this system. Overall I am very happy with this system and how it allows me to customize how I irrigate my garden beds. I am very impressed with the detail and thoughtfulness of the design as I did not find it lacking in any way.

Fantastic solution for container gardening! Orbit’s B-Hyve smart hose faucet timer is exactly what I have needed for my container gardens. I have multiple gardens, and now I can control their watering with a single app on my phone. I don’t have convenient power to either water faucet for traditional valves; this solves my problem since the B-Hyve timer is powered by 2 AA batteries. The kit comes with 50’ of ½” distribution tubing and 50’ of ¼” soaker tubing, along with ½” elbows, a T, and a pressure regulator/filter, all of which are reusable. I love that these fittings are reusable. Mulch over the soaker hose to conserve water by eliminating evaporation waste. Also included are 20 self-piercing couplings that are also reusable. The included tubing cutter works well. The B-Hyve timer is brilliant. Check out the app to see the many great features—my favorite is setting the manual watering time. Voice control with Google and Alexa is really cool, and the rain/wind delay is automatic based on the address input during setup. I could not be more pleased with all of the components included, and expect to add a few more timers in the future to get all of my watering needs, front and back, in a single app on my phone. Perfect!

My wife and I set this up in our raised beds where we grow different types of lettuce and strawberries. This was incredibly easy to cut to size and install, perhaps an hour at most and we could have done it faster if we weren't trying to be mindful of exactly where and how we wanted the hoses to lay out. I will also add that we laid the supply line out in the sun for a few hours and this made it much easier to manipulate. Once it was all installed I connected the system directly to the hydrant to leak check it and make sure everything was working as expected. I gave the timer to my wife for her to figure out, I don't play with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth applications, and she was able to get the system set up to her satisfaction.

I can only make a limited recommendation for the Garden Box Drip Watering Kit with B-Hyve Smart Hose Faucet Timer and Wi-Fi Hub. Overall, I feel like it's a cool technology-driven system to automate your watering with precision. However, if you are a recreational gardener, it may not fit your needs and be more complicated than needed. The system operates by making a closed loop of the 1/2 inch hose. There is no end cap so you have to make a closed loop. I am currently using a linear strip of hose with drip nozzles spliced in anywhere I want, closed at the end with a end cap. It was probably 1/2 to a 1/3rd of the cost of this design. A big difference is that the current timer is a manual dial (with LCD display) and no wifi. I feel like that is sufficient for what I need for my two garden beds and two planter boxes. Look into the design, style, and consider your set up before buying. Whatever the cost, the right system design will make the biggest impact on your satisfaction.

This watering kit was easy to install, and frees me from hand-watering my garden. Plus, watering the base of the plants rather than from overhead is healthier for the plants. A HUGE added bonus is that the watering can be controlled via their b-hyve app right from my smartphone. It works by wirelessly connecting to the supplied wi-fi hub that you plug into an indoor outlet somewhere near the location of where your timer will be attached to the outside faucet. Water must remain on for timer to work. You can also use bluetooth if wi-fi is not available. A smart way to water your garden!

For my little home garden this watering kit is absolutely perfect. I no longer need to run down to my garden with a watering can even remember to do it in the first place. Set the timer for when you want to activate the soaker hose you have laid out in your garden, leave it hooked up to a hose and the plants will be watered on whatever schedule you set. If you feel you need a little extra water today or a little less depending on weather conditions, the included wifi hub and an app on your smartphone and you can override the schedule as desired or needed. It also comes with its own handy dandy tubing cutter for nice even cuts for the connectors. Now all I have to do is keep the garden free of bugs and other pests and enjoy my harvest.

While we haven't planted or started our garden yet (too early) we are looking forward to using this watering kit because the garden area gets full sun and in the past we had to hand water the area, sometimes more than once due to summer heat. We're looking forward to using this and I hope I can come back to leave another review when summer (and garden) is here!