This is a really innovative concept, but I feel that B-Hyve got a little tripped up in rolling ou...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.
by Termie