The Eve Aqua Smart Water Controller Lets You Water Your Garden From Your Phone

Want automatic irrigation for your yard but don’t have an in-ground sprinkler system? No problem. Thanks to smart water controllers—like the third generation of Aqua from venerable smart-home-product manufacturer Eve—it’s possible to water your lawn from your phone while you’re on vacation in an entirely different time zone.

The Aqua is a spigot-connected water controller that requires nothing more than an old-fashioned hose and an off-the-shelf sprinkler—or you could swap your hose for drip irrigation tubing. Once installed, the Aqua connects the exterior hose fitting of your choice to your home’s wireless ecosystem and your smartphone, allowing you to tend to your garden as you see fit, all with the plumbing you already have.

As someone deeply familiar with the home-irrigation-system landscape (I’ve been testing products in the category for more than eight years), the Aqua’s setup intrigued me. It doesn’t require any additional hardware—like a Wi-Fi bridge—to operate, making it more streamlined than most competing smart water controllers available today. However, no advanced feature or sleek design is more important than a product’s primary function, which in this case is managing water flow, and I notably found the Aqua both leaky and complicated to use.

Setup

The Aqua isn’t tiny. Measuring about 4 x 4 x 3 inches, it was definitely noticeable as an accessory on my spigot. Composed of two shell-like halves that squeeze together, the interior secrets away two AA batteries that supply all the juice needed to power the device. The only external control on the Aqua is a single button on the front that manually turns water on and off. While competing products often require an external hub that plugs into a wall outlet, bridging the connection to your Wi-Fi network, Aqua’s wireless controller is built-in, meaning I needed to manage only one device, not two.