Piece of mind; worth the price and monthly fee
I've heard about these for a while and thought it would be a nice thing to have, but never actually bought one, until now. After our neighbor's house flooded for the second time I thought it might be a good idea to have this, since all of these houses were built by the same builder. If they're having that many problems it could be a matter of time before we do as well, as both times their house was severely damaged. I'm not a plumber but have basic skills and had no problems installing the Flo valve. I used a 2" nipple between the Flo and our water filter and a shark bite on the other side to connect into our PEX pipe that comes off the PRV. It took less than an hour to install. Setup was simple and instructions were easy to follow. It took an hour or so for it to realize that it was installed, and then took another week or so to 'learn' our usage habits. Right after installation I began getting real-time data on flow rate, pressure, temperature, and gallons used. The data is pretty cool, but historical data is extremely limited. In the app, you can only get hourly data for the current day and weekly data for the current week. On the website you can only view/download hourly data for the current and prior day, daily for current or past four weeks, and monthly for the past 12 months. We've had the Flo installed for just over two weeks now and had no problems with it. We subscribed to Flo Protect but thus far it still has not identified individual fixtures. A note on that; they say 'we need a couple weeks of data before we can identify fixtures.' I contacted support and they told me it's actually three weeks. I suggested to them that they change their messaging on that to manage expectations. I've seen quite a few people unhappy that they have to pay $5/mo for the Flo Protect plan after paying $400+ for the valve. I have no problem with paying for it. We pay $15/mo for our alarm monitoring after paying around 2k for our system to protect our home. Water can cause severe damage, so I'm good with paying $5/mo to monitor that since it's probably more likely to happen than a break in when you think about all the places plumbing could fail and the extent of damage it can cause. Sure, insurance will probably pay for most of the repairs, but as I sit here listening to them jack hammering up the hardwood floors a couple doors from me for the entire day and watch all the various work trucks coming and going, I think of the inconvenience of it all. Overall I give the system a 4 star rating because availability of historical data is quite limited and I'd like the ability to download detailed hourly or daily data for a large period of time into Excel to perform more detailed analysis. If the data was more available I'd give it a full 5 stars. Support through the water concierge chat is excellent but anything I've sent via e-mail has gone completely unanswered, so I recommend using the chat. Today I purposely left our kitchen faucet on at a trickle while I was eating lunch and they called my phone after around 30 minutes to alert me to long water duration. I also got an e-mail about it and an app notification, all of which gave me the option to turn off my water immediately or ignore it. They said if I did not respond they would shut it off in five minutes. I'm pretty sure if a pipe broke and a lot of water was flowing it would have alerted much faster, but I only left the faucet barely trickling. All things considered I think this is a great product and both it and the monitoring are worth it in my opinion. Update 3/8/2020 Usage by fixture finally became available after a little over three weeks of use and I wanted to provide some information on this. My expectations were pretty low for this feature and thus far I would say they may have just barely met them. My thoughts on this are that it would be quite difficult to isolate usage to a particular fixture, since the only data points they could use to identify fixtures would be flow rate and duration and many things could have similar flow rates, not to mention overlapping usage (i.e. you flush the toilet, then go and wash your hands, washing machine could be running while you're taking a shower, multiple people using water, etc.) That being said, it has done a fairly good job in identifying faucets, toilets, and showers/baths, but not always correctly. It has not been able to isolate anything else, such as the washing machine, dishwasher, refrigerator, etc. You do have the ability to go in and reclassify an event but I'm not certain that it learns anything from that or not. I know I changed one it got wrong from faucet to shower/bath and later I looked and it had changed it back. When you look at the event details it only provides the time, duration, and gallons used. It would be extremely helpful if it also provided the flow rate, as that is one of the most useful data points in identifying what fixture may have been using water. I plan to make that suggestion and hope they'll consider implementing it. If I can accurately reclassify events and it actually learns from that then maybe it would get more accurate over time. My overall rating and opinion of the device is unchanged and I still feel it is very useful and provides an extra layer of protection for our home. Update 4/7/2020 Upgrading my overall rating from 4 to 5 stars because they just added expanded access to historical data which was the one thing that I felt was lacking. You can now view data by day, week, month, year, and even by custom date range. Being able to view a custom range is helpful if you want to compare the Flo data to your water bill as you can set it to the same billing period. Read more
