Orbit B-hyve XR sprinkler timer review: One of the best smart irrigation systems – TechHive

Three years after its first steps into smart irrigation systems, Orbits B-hyve brand is back with its most advanced smart watering hardware yet. The new B-hyve XR is stuffed with features, so lets dive into it.

For starters, the hardwarea beefy device that weighs more than two poundsis designed for either indoor or outdoor installation, with no additional housing required. (That said, the device is clearly not fully waterproof, so Id advise giving it some level of protection if youre mounting the XR outside.)

A row of connectors beneath a removable panel supports up to eight valves (or 16 valves for the next model up, which costs an additional $30) and includes room for a rain or freeze sensor. Unique to the smart irrigation space, the XR includes no external power brick (which is one reason why its outdoor friendly); the transformer is instead built into the main housing. This also helps to explain its overall size and weight.

The Orbit B-hyve XR relies on the typical clips to secure your sprinkler systems wiring, but it takes quite a lot of force to shove the leads in (16-zone model shown here).

As with most smart watering systems, your valve leads attach via simple wire clips. (The previous B-hyve required wiring to be attached with tiny screws.) I initially tried inserting my leads into these clips and thought they were connected, only to find that when I ran a test watering run, nothing happened. After some trial and error, I found that the XR requires fairly long wiring leads, and those leads need to be inserted with a significant amount of force in order to hold. I ended up trimming and re-stripping my wiring to improve the connection, after which everything worked fine.

With the B-hyve XR powered up, youll quickly notice its most interesting feature: A panel of three tiny, color LCD screens built into the hexagonal design pattern on the housing. These micro-displays give you some basic information about your system, including the current weather and the time and date of your next scheduled run time. Strangely, the weather report only includes the overall condition (sunny, raining, etc.) but not the temperature, which would have been a bit more useful.

While its a monstrous hardware device, the B-hyve XR offers a number of new features you wont find on competing water controllers.

Once your hardware is configured, its time to use the B-hyve app to connect the system to Wi-Fi. Both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks are supported, and I had no trouble bringing the XR online, after which I could begin configuring my watering zones. Like most modern sprinkler controllers, the B-hyve XR offers both manual and smart watering programs, the latter setting up what it thinks is an ideal watering schedule based on answers you provide about the size, condition, and composition of your lawn or garden.

You can set up to four separate watering programs, or let B-hyves smart watering system decide for you.

After telling the app about the soil, plant types, sprinkler heads, ground slope, and sun condition, my system suggested a somewhat strange smart watering schedule: two 18-minute soaks, one right after the other, running once every three days. I dont know if this is really the ideal way to water my plants, as I know a smaller amount of water every day tends to work best in my garden. The total amount of water being delivered over the course of a week, however, was just about right.

If you want to fine-tune things, B-hyve supports catch cups, wherein you physically measure the actual amount of water your system is putting out, and then use that information to tweak its programming. As well, if you have a Flume water-leak system installed, a new partnership with that company lets you use its data to measure exactly how much water each zone is using. If the numbers suddenly jump, thats a sign that theres a leak or break somewhere in your irrigation tubing. This feature is available now, but Orbit says it wont be fully implemented until the end of the year.

If you dont like B-hyves smart schedule, its easy to disable. The system includes four manual program schedules that you can customize, and all five of these schedules (including the smart schedule) can be turned on and off individually or all run simultaneously. If your municipality has watering restrictions, you can include this information as a sort of master override over all programs to prevent water from flowing during certain days or times.

If your water utility issues restrictions as to when you can irrigate, you can input that information into the B-hyve app.

The system includes configurable push notifications, but only for warnings and when watering is finished, not when it starts. Alexa and Google Home are both supported and fairly robustly, letting you use your voice to run on-demand watering programs, delay an upcoming schedule, and more.

B-hyves app is reasonably intuitive, but its biggest flaw is how it presents future and historical watering information. A daily calendar gives you a look at the watering schedule past and present, but it can only fit a few hours of a single day on the screen at a time, which means youll need to scroll up and down and do a lot of switching between days to get a good sense of whats going on. Theres also a watering history function deep in the settings menu, but this only shows you the last time that water was run, not a true history of watering events. If B-hyve overhauls the calendar to be more functional, itll go a long way toward enhancing its overall usability.

The B-hyve XR also includes onboard controls that let you do a lot of things by interacting with the hardware, sans app, but this is largely a missed opportunity: Theres only a single button on the front of the XR, and you use that to do everything, through combinations of short presses and long presses of that one button. Figuring this out isnt easy, so B-hyve includes an exhaustive cheat sheet on the inside of the flap that covers the wiring leads. But its written in tiny type, so youll need to remove it entirely to make any use of it. And frankly, all of this is really convoluted; its much easier to just use the app rather than futz with the button.

At $150 for an 8-zone unit, the B-hyve XR is a good value, if not quite an insanely great one. The product works well and the learning curve is less steep than with competing hardware; as such, its definitely worth serious consideration for just about any environmentespecially if you need a unit that you can mount outside.

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Orbit B-hyve XR sprinkler timer review: One of the best smart irrigation systems - TechHive