THIRDREALITY Zigbee Smart Watering Kit for Potted Plants, Indoor Plant Watering System, Hub Required, Compatible with Echo Devices with Zigbee Hub Built-in, Home Assistant, SmartThings, Hubitat, Homey

Works as expected. Not sure if I have the nozzles installed properly because the product photos show them differently from the instruction manual. I tried adjusting them to work as a dripper but it just created leaks so I loosened the threaded caps to prevent water from spraying everywhere but it creates a stream of water instead of gentle drip. Will take some fine tuning to get it dialed in, I think. Set up automations in HomeKit and I like that it’s a stateless switch that only runs the pump for the amount of time that you set locally on the machine then automatically turns off.Not sure how I feel about running it on batteries. Might wire up an adapter plug once I run down this set of AAs.

Zigbee powered, very simple. Its a indoor water system. Not much to say about it but nicer then the ones you have to flash ESPHome onto.

Was hoping for a Homekit enabled watering system, when I got this, it really looked like it did, but appears I was wrong. It's a Zigbee device. This should still, in theory, work with Home Assistant across multiple home automation solutions, but just bummed it's not native Homekit enabled.For a stationary device, something likely never to move because.. you know, plants and water... why doesn't this have an AC adapter? An external power brick isn't that much to add. Or just a barrel jack and you supply your own AC adapter, that would work too, but instead its AA batteries or nothing.For its function, its fine enough for a small water pump. Could water a few plants with it, but probably nothing beyond that. It's more for keeping indoor houseplants happy.

While it works really go it would be ideal if there was a unit that had constant power. I've had to replace the batteries once already.

This THIRDREALITY Smart Watering Kit is described as smart. When I saw it was Zigbee and compatible with Echo Devices with Zigbee and SmartThings I got excited. I currently have other Zigbee devices controlled with Alexa routines through my Samsung SmartThings Hub. So I thought this Alexa controlled automated watering system was a no brainer.When I received the kit, and read the quick start guide, I discovered that it is compatible but not advanced. Basically the only control available through standard Zigbee and an Alexa routine is on and off. Alexa sees the watering pump only as a switch. There is no battery level feedback, logging, error reporting, etc. So I stared to wonder if this thing would even work the way I wanted.With the buttons on the unit, the controller/pump will water at a preset watering duration (10sec-16.5min) and at a preset frequency (0-30 days). So I left the settings at default – ten seconds watering and zero days.Connection to the Samsung SmartThings Hub was a breeze and Alexa saw it immediately as a switch. In the Alexa app I pressed the on button and the pump started right up but then turned itself off after 10 seconds. Alexa showed the switch was now off. I tried it again and the pump turned itself off after 10 seconds. I then set the watering duration on the physical pump to 30 seconds and tried it again. The pump turned itself off after 30 seconds. This turned out to be is a good thing. I could use the Alexa app to turn on and off the pump before the 30 seconds had passed. So if you set the watering duration on the physical pump to a longer run time than the on/off switch routine time in the Alexa app, then the set time on the physical pump will act as a fail-safe and turn off the pump if the pump does not get the off command from Alexa. Great!YES, as long as you have a Zigbee connection, you can use an Alexa or a SmartThings routine to schedule watering.To water base on soil moisture levels is another thing. Apparently you would need the THIRDREALITY Smart Soil Moisture Sensor. But THIRDREALITY says that Alexa does not support humidity and they don’t recommend using the Smart Soil Moisture Sensor with Alexa. It then looks like you would also need the THIRDREALITY Smart Bridge MZ1. With the bridge then you could link THIRDREALITY Zigbee end devices to the Matter protocol they use to achieve easy control and monitoring. This was too involved for me.So as a simple indoor plant watering on, watering off pump Zigbee controller this thing is pretty good.

I have tried out many of these types of watering systems and they all do the basics pretty well: water your plants with water from a container, on a schedule. From there, they can add in features that make it easier to program, monitor different aspects of the process etc. Since this touts connectivity to home automation, you might think you are getting a little extra, but sadly, using the automation to flip a switch doesn't cut it anymore! Then add in that they are using batteries for this and this will quickly become a fail at the worst time. Let's say you go on vacation for a week, what are the chances the batteries will last? I wouldn't count on it. The added connection to the automation only adds complexity where you are not getting the benefits. What they should do is get it connected to AC power, possibly with a rechargeable battery as the back up system and then add in additional functionality to the program side.

The biggest issue with this machine: it doesn't have an option to be plugged in. For something like this I'd really like to not have to change out batteries.Unfortunately I wasn't able to get this to correctly pair with my Conbee II Zigbee adapter, so I wasn't able to do anything more than the basic onboard programming.I do wish it mentioned how much water it pumps, because without testing it out you really have no clue, which is a bummer since it makes setup a little more difficult.Currently I'm using this for my snake plant, which only gets water once every other week, and it's been happy with that.