Orbit 57950 B-hyve Indoor/outdoor 12 Station Wifi Sprinkler System Controller

Beware this product is only 110Volt and should not be sold to 220V countries. Thank you Amazon for not making that clear.....

I replaced an Irritrol 12-zone controller with this one after it failed to turn on for an unexplained reason. Sometimes, there are purchase that bring much more value than the price you paid, and this is one of them. This unit is so much simpler and convenient to operate! It'll save me tons of time and headache.First, instead of losing my programs every fall when I would shut down the system for the winter, the B-Hyve not only has a battery backup but my programs are stored in the app (and cloud?) as well.Then, when testing and reprogramming the system in the spring, I could never easily recall which zone was which with the Irritrol. The B-Hyve app now lets me assign meaningful names to my zones, but more importantly, it lets me associate a picture to each of the zones.Again, when testing my system in the spring, I would use the Irritrol's 1 or 2-minute test mode that would activate the 12 zones sequentially, chasing the zones across my front and backyard to confirm they were functioning. Now, I can just walk around and activate one zone at a time remotely with my phone to test it out.Lastly, a couple of weeks ago with the old system, I received a warning from the "water patrol" because my program was ending later than the city's prescribed watering hours. I didn't take the time in the spring to add up the duration of each station of my main program to confirm I was within the permitted watering hours. With the B-Hyve, I can simply go into the easy to read logs to know exactly when each station operated and when the program ended.I've automated many appliances in the house over the last few years (light switches, thermostat, garage doors), but the B-Hyve smart watering system is the best value for the money among all of them. And I haven't even covered all of its features in this review. If you're facing some of the issues that I enumerated above, this is a must buy!

Overall it’s great. Wire connectors are easy to use! Easy to install.The app wasn’t intuitive at first.Biggest problem is that it doesn’t allow two programs to run at the same time like my old Hardie system. Which is tough when the city restricts everything to ONLY 2 hours.Watering history has trouble with programs running through midnight and the date, with local time (PST) versus GMT. It confuses which day it watered because GMT is already a day ahead. So sometimes the history is wrong or on the wrong day.It only notifies you AFTER it waters, not at the START. START notification would be good as you could check the security cameras to see if it is actually watering.

One year later and still riddled with issues. This unit has many bugs. It is not ready for retail release.The help suggestions still say that when it crashes, which is daily, all you have to do is go oit to the controller itself AND UNPLUG IT AND WAIT FOR TWN SECONDS AND PLUG IT BACK IN. This is not remote control if you have to reboot the stupid thing daily by unplugging it. What if I was on vacation and I wanted to co trol my watering from afar? Isn't that what the point of this wifi, internet connected device is?Nope. Gotta be there every day to unplug it and replug it.Login is buggy. WHY IS THERE A PASSWORD PROTECTED LOGIN!? WHONIS TRYING TO HACK MY LAWN SPRINKLER?Sometimes it waters unexpectedly, outside any program.If your device crashes so easily, please put a reboot feature into the firmware. It really deflates the whole automation concept of the controller to have to go out and MANUALLY unplug and replug the unit.

This product worked awesome for a year, loved the wifi interface so I could monitor on my phone. Easy to program. I liked that in the shoulder season I could easily water different beds as they became populated with plants. I also liked during the hot days I could pull out my phone and add extra water. When I went to turn it back on in the spring it would not power up. Customer service was AWFULL! 15 days of text messages going back and forth for them to tell me to start the warranty process which is how I got the number in the first place. Finally giving up and going with Rainbird!

Super impressed with this new control unit so far. I replaced an old Toro Ez Pro 8300 that I’ve been fighting with for a few years. Easy to connect the dozen or so wires, everything labeled well. Wifi link and software setup was an easy guided process. Total time to install and setup, maybe 30 min. Now I can control my system from anywhere.I’m really interested to see how the smart watering and auto rain delay works out... it basically watches local weather and decides when to (or not to) water automatically. It does this while following local restriction rules I entered. If I never have to think about changing it and it just does it’s thing, I’ll be even more impressed. I should have upgraded years ago!