Keeping warm at home is important, especially at winter when a sudden snow flurry or rainy day means you arrive home bedraggled. Stepping into a cold house and waiting for it to warm up will not be what you had in mind.
The joy of a connected home system is that it should be able to welcome you home to a temperature that's just right, and without wasting your money by heating the place when nobody's there. Even better, it should be able to look after itself, so you don't have to think about it.
The move versatile the control, the better. Which is where Elgato Eve comes in.
Exceptional precision
Eve Thermo is a system that offers real flexibility and granular control so you can set the temperature in individual rooms easily and, thanks to its compatibility with Apple’s HomeKit technology, from wherever you are.
That's because Eve Thermo is a smart radiator valve which can adjust the heat the radiator puts out, controlled on the valve itself or remotely.
So, instead of setting the temperature for the whole house, as you have to on many systems, you can make sure it's toasty in the living room, but turn the radiator off in the spare bedroom, providing you have Eve Thermo valves in those rooms.
Set-up is easy: Eve products work out of the box without the need for a bridge device or cloud service. And the valve has a touch-sensitive screen which displays the temperature to which it's set. This is shown in degrees, not the usual 1 to 5 scale on some regular valves.
The valve can be mounted horizontally or vertically, with the display adjustable according to its orientation.
The Elgato Eve app allows you to set up schedules for the radiators to turn on or off and these schedules are then wirelessly transferred to the radiator valve and stored there. You can also control it from your iPhone or iPad, for instance.
Or, if you want to, you can simply press the touch-sensitive panel on the valve to adjust it in increments of 0.5 degrees Celsius - handy if you've put your iPhone down somewhere and can't find it. Again.
Oh, and if you're worried that the kids might turn the temperature up or down, you can lock the control.
Make life simple
But the real joy of Eve Thermo is the way it makes your life easier through its advanced features, enabled by an Apple Home Hub (the hub can be an Apple TV, Apple HomePod or an iPad that stays at home). Of course, the schedule is a useful way to set your heating, but what happens on the day you're home unexpectedly early? Or don't want to waste energy heating the house when you're out late?
With Eve Thermo you can use the app so that the heating turns on when the first person in the household gets home, and off when the last person leaves. If there's a sudden cold snap, and you want the heating to come on earlier, you can use the app on your iPhone and turn it on before you leave work, for instance.
Simple but sophisticated
With the Home app on an iPad or iPhone, say, you can create a Scene which performs the routine you want it to.
So then, as you walk into the house, the 'Evening Coming Home' scene (you can call it whatever you like) turns on the heating in the living room and kitchen plus, if you have other compatible products, switches the lights in the hall to a warm, welcoming ambient setting, and even closes the blinds.
If you decide you've had enough of the cold weather and are going to jet away on holiday, there's a holiday setting on the Eve app which turns the heating down to a prearranged temperature, so you can be sure the pipes won't freeze, no matter how chilly it gets.
And there's more. Eve Door & Window are wireless contact sensors which know when a door or window has been opened. They can talk to the Home Hub which will alert Eve Thermo that a window is opened so it suspends heating, for example. Or Eve Motion, the wireless movement sensor, can be primed so that if it senses someone moving in the bedroom in the morning, it'll turn the heating on for an hour because it spots you're getting up a little earlier than usual. You can fine-tune scenarios so that ultimately, Eve Thermo can get on with the work of keeping you warm without you having to think about it at all.