Elgato Expands Its Homekit Lineup With New Eve Energy Sensor For U S Customers

Elgato already makes several smart sensors for the home, and today it’s adding the Eve Energy accessory for U.S. customers to its lineup. Eve Energy works similarly to other smart plugs: connect it to the wall socket, then power appliances on and off using your smartphone. Eve Energy also doubles as a power meter, however, and there’s HomeKit support as well …

That means you can use Siri on the iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch to power connected appliances on or off when using Eve Energy. And HomeKit lets you automate actions too using triggers like location and time. Or you can automate actions based on data gathered by other Elgato Eve accessories or HomeKit gear from any brand.

Even without HomeKit, Eve Energy is setup and can be controlled from the Elgato Eve app for iPhone and iPad. I’ve used this app to test other Elgato accessories; it has a nice look and feel plus you can see HomeKit accessories from other brands in it as well.

If you’re looking to gain new insights on exactly how much energy a certain appliance is using, Eve Energy adds a power meter function to the connected switch setup too. This means you can actually see, not just guess, how much power what you have connected to Eve Energy is using. If you automate power on and off based on when you actually need to use the connected appliance, you can hopefully see a real energy savings over time.

The Elgato Eve app lets you visualize energy consumption by day, week, or month. Siri and HomeKit make automating and controlling connected accessories and even creating scenes and triggers possible.

Aside from including a power meter, Eve Energy also varies from other HomeKit switches by using Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi, to connect to your iPhone or iPad. This is a first for HomeKit-enabled plugs.

Wi-Fi networks tend to have greater range than Bluetooth, which caps between 30-60 feet, but the pitch here is that using low-energy Bluetooth frees up network bandwidth as we add more and more Wi-Fi devices to our networks.

For testing, I have Elgato’s Eve Weather and Eve Room HomeKit sensors, which also rely on Bluetooth, and don’t experience any range issues when on Wi-Fi, which may be thanks to the presence of an Apple TV in the mix. Elgato’s Eve Energy likely works similarly which alleviates any concern over range.