There are many ways Eve products can make your home smarter. Here are nine to get you started:

1 The lights are on, because someone's home

Eve Motion will alert you if it senses movement, but this doesn't have to be limited to tipping you off about a possible intruder. You can create an automation which means that when it sees someone has walked into the house, or bedroom or whichever room Eve Motion is in, it turns on the lights appropriately. In fact, if your lights are smart bulbs like Philips Hue, you can use conditions to refine things further so in the evening the lighting is warm and welcoming and in every case you can specify, for instance, that the lights only come on after sunset.

2 Hey, Siri, put the kettle on

If you have an Apple HomePod, or a recent iPhone or iPad, you can turn to it while you lie in bed in the morning and command it to turn on the Eve Power smart plug which you've attached to the kettle or coffee maker in the kitchen. Since you can name the plug as you wish, you don't have to say, 'turn on the kitchen smart plug' - who would do that? Just say 'Hey, Siri, turn the coffee machine on' or whatever, and your hot water or readily heated espresso machine will be waiting for you when you reach the kitchen.

3 Make smart home accessible to everyone

One of the cutest Elgato accessories is the Eve Button, a small square chunk of aluminium with, as you might expect from the name, a button on the front which can be pressed with a satisfying click. It's a little remote control so somebody who finds technology daunting or is a guest in your house, so doesn't have access to your iPhone or iPad, say, can press the button to turn the lights off or turn that kettle on. Or whatever you've programmed the Button to do. In fact, it can be set to three different tasks, responding separately to a short press, a long press and a double-press. There are even colour-coded picture labels that can be stuck to the Button, to remind users what it does.

4 Picture the scene

Scenes are one of the coolest things about Apple's Home app. They allow you to create automated responses. And Eve can be part of that. So, when you open the front door at the end of the day, Eve Motion knows the door has opened. It can automatically turn on lights in the hallway or living room and adjust the temperature on individual Eve Thermo thermostatic valves. That means you can turn the heating on in the living room but not the rooms upstairs. Scenes can be quite sophisticated, so it can know only to do this in the evening, for instance, not when the door opens in the morning. Unless you want it to. 

5 Machine talks to machine

Similarly, you can allow one gadget to interact with another, even if they're not all made by Elgato. Eve Door & Window also knows if a door (or window, obviously) is opened or closed. So, when you receive an alert that a window has just been opened, if you have a security camera which can see that part of the room, the camera can show you what it's seen. You could simultaneously have a smart bulb turn on, too. Likewise, if you have an Eve Degree weather station, you can set it so that if the temperature in the living room rises to a set temperature, your Eve Power knows to turn the fan on to cool things down. The Eve Degree is weather-resistant so you can even place it outside on the balcony. Glance at the Home app or say, ‘Hey, Siri, what's the weather like on the balcony' and Siri can speak back, revealing the temperature outside before you've taken a step into the great outdoors. That’s you talking to your HomePod or Apple Watch, for instance, which communicates with Eve Degree, and the Apple device speaks the temperature back to you. Neat.

6 Feel secure in your home, home or away

If you've gone on holiday and you remember you didn't leave any lights on, use the Eve app on your iPhone to turn on that floor lamp that's connected to an Eve Energy in the living room. Not sophisticated enough? You can set up a schedule for your smart plug to come on and go off at pre-arranged times. If the bulb in the relevant light is Philips Hue or LIFX, say, you can change the colour of the light as well, for a subtler, more complex effect.

7 Quite an atmosphere

There are more things you can monitor, such as the air quality. Eve Room is a useful way to check air quality, as well as temperature and humidity, in a room, whether you're there or not. So, if you've been cooking up a storm, the kitchen air may be less fresh than you'd like. Eve Room can tell you. And if after dinner you've left the window open, Eve Door & Window knows this, so you can check on your smartphone from the bedroom, or when you're away from the house - much better for settling that nagging doubt without heading home again.

8 Knowledge is power

The Eve app remembers: so, if the kids have come down with a cold, you can check back on the records for Eve Room or Eve Degree to see if their sniffles coincided with the humidity or the temperature being too high in their bedroom. You can adjust it. Checking how the temperature has changed is also useful if you or the children have suddenly been having trouble sleeping, for instance. 

9 Rules are rules

You can also assign multiple actions to multiple gadgets by the creation of rules. Lights on when you come home, but only after sunset, as mentioned before. Get out of bed and the bedroom light inches up, the bathroom towel rail warms up, the coffee maker starts its work - but only after 7AM, say. You don't want all those things to happen in the middle of the night, do you? Rules are easy to set up but are capable of considerable sophistication, and the more imaginative you are, the more you can do.