I replaced four Wemo smart plugs with four Eve Energy (Matter) plugs, and the difference is night and day. These are, without question, the easiest and most reliable smart home accessories I’ve ever set up. Finally, “Matter” makes a difference. I live fully in the Apple ecosystem, so HomeKit is my control center. Setup was almost laughably simple: I removed the old Wemo plugs from HomeKit, plugged in the Eve Energy plugs, scanned the Matter QR code with my iPhone, gave each plug a name—and that was it. All four were set up and working in about five minutes total. Performance is excellent. Where my Wemo plugs took a few seconds to respond, the Eve plugs are instant. More importantly, they’ve been rock-solid after power outages. I live in rural upstate New York and deal with frequent outages due to wind, rain, and snow. My Wemo plugs only reconnected about half the time after power was restored, often requiring furniture to be moved and a frustrating re-pairing process. So far, after two outages (including a brief power blip that always broke the Wemos), all four Eve plugs came back online immediately and worked perfectly. These Matter plugs clearly benefit from a proper “border router.” I have several HomePod minis and Apple TVs (recent generations), and I suspect having multiple hubs around the house helps everything work so smoothly. I can’t comment on performance without a border router, but if you’re an Apple household, you likely already have one. As a bonus, I downloaded the free Eve app after setup and was pleasantly surprised. It neatly organized all my smart devices into clean, easy-to-use groupings and can even act as a central control app if you want. I’ll continue using HomeKit for now, but the Eve app is excellent. It also shows energy usage per plug—not something I personally need, but a nice extra. I’ve been using smart home devices for years, and it’s genuinely refreshing to finally find something that works exactly as promised. If your home setup is similar to mine, stop shopping and buy these. They just work. Read more
This plug from the same brand impressed me again. Onboarding was amazingly smooth. SmartThings added it flawlessly. Alexa recognized it and set it up right away. Google Home Hub struggled at first, likely because of shared admin rights with SmartThings and how devices were assigned. My Hub also seems to need a firmware update to fully support Matter over Thread, so I expect that to improve. Note that it requires a Thread Border Router. The plug is super responsive and stable. Energy monitoring works well, though it is a single meter for the whole plug. The green status LED is quite bright and there is no way to dim or turn it off. In Google Home it showed up as a plug with an energy meter, and after a refresh it stayed that way. Minor annoyance, not a deal breaker. Overall, a great smart plug with fast setup and fast response. I appreciate the privacy focus. I would buy it again. Read more
I had Wemo switches, but they haven’t been all that reliable. They would just stop working after some time. So what’s the use of having a switch that doesn’t work when you need them. These are much more reliable than the Wemo switches. They are also have really good privacy. You don’t even have to register any info with the company to start using them. They don’t really support Alexa or Google out of the box directly, but you can add on Matter support which will supposedly allow you to connect to those other services. Since Matter support with various manufacturers is on the new side, don’t know how good the support is yet. haven’t tried it, since I’m just decided to stick with HomeKit with threads. I just recently upgraded to the latest AppleTV which supports thread and it works much faster compared to my older AppleTV that didn’t have thread support. With threads, the more devices you add, the more better your communication is between them. It’s supposed to be more stable since if one device fails, another device will take over as the master and everything else will continue to work. I love that it has energy monitoring and is able to tell you how much watts your device is currently using. And shows how much you electricity you will using over the year. It’s also much more energy efficient than my older wifi plugs. Their app is OK, it could use some improvement, some of the settings are kind of buried too low and makes it hard to find, like names of device and adding favorites. You can have groups, but you can’t set a schedule for a group. You have to set them up individually for each item in a group, which is a pain. The group more for HomeKit where you can just tell Siri to turn on a particular group. It also just shows up as a single item within HomeKit, as opposed to the Eve app which you can still see all the individual items. One thing that the Eve app as well as Apple HomeKit cannot do is automatically turn off a device after a period of time when it’s turned on. That was one feature that Wemo was able to do. That way if you want to automatically turn off a device after it’s been left on for a period of time, you could a set a rule or automation to do that. Overall a great product that is energy efficient and has great privacy built in. Read more
Thank you Eve for doing Matter right! These are great smart plugs, which provide the ease of use and functionality promised by the manufacturer and the Matter working group. I've converted all of my smart plugs to these, and have no issues keeping them connected and functioning. Read more
