Eve Announces New Matter Outlet, Light Switch and Blinds

[MacRumors]

Smart home company Eve Systems today announced several new Matter-enabled smart home devices, including the new Eve Energy Outlet and updated versions of the Eve Light Switch and Eve Motion Blinds. With Matter integration, all of the devices work with HomeKit.

Eve Energy Outlet connects to a smart home setup using Thread. It includes two receptacles that can be controlled individually, and it provides advanced energy monitoring functionality so users can see just how much energy devices are consuming.

Eve Energy Outlet is able to replace any existing outlet in a single or multi-gang installation. It will integrate with other HomeKit products, allowing for automations and control via the Home app and Siri. Energy monitoring will be available in the Eve app.

Eve also announced the upcoming launch of Matter versions of the Eve Light Switch and the Eve Blinds Collection. The Light Switch replaces traditional switches and adds smart functionality, while the Eve Blinds Collection is a lineup of made-to-measure smart blinds.

Eve Energy Outlet is set to launch in February, and it will be available from the Eve Store and from Amazon. It will be priced at $50. The Matter-enabled Eve Light Switch will launch in the second quarter of 2024 for $50, while the Eve Blinds Collection will be available in the Eve Store on February 1.

Article Link: Eve Announces New Matter Outlet, Light Switch and Blinds

 

[Makosuke]

Smart outlets are funny, because they're a product that the geek in me feels like I should want, but I have absolutely no actual use for. I plug in lots of stuff, but exactly 0% of it is something that there's even marginal value in remotely controlling. Electronics, computers, kitchen appliances, and so on, all of it is either always-on or there's no value at all in remotely controlling it. I guess I need more desk lamps or something?

The blinds I'd be excited about, especially since they're retrofit on existing blinds, except they appear to only be for roller blinds, and my house is very much a mini-blind house. Oh well.

 

[DaveN]

Smart outlets are funny, because they're a product that the geek in me feels like I should want, but I have absolutely no actual use for. I plug in lots of stuff, but exactly 0% of it is something that there's even marginal value in remotely controlling. Electronics, computers, kitchen appliances, and so on, all of it is either always-on or there's no value at all in remotely controlling it. I guess I need more desk lamps or something?

The blinds I'd be excited about, especially since they're retrofit on existing blinds, except they appear to only be for roller blinds, and my house is very much a mini-blind house. Oh well.

I use them for controlling older items that work best when scheduled but they don’t have that functionality. Things like chargers and activation motors. Saves me from the monotony of doing repetitive tasks.

Edit: I don’t use the outlet but the older version that plugs into an outlet and then the item plugs into the Eve device.

 

[Kevin2055]

What’s the matter?

 

[bottsjw]

Ok... is it me or did it bring back memories of these?! (at about the same price point)
Right down to the lights being in the same place as the old dials!

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Smart outlets are funny, because they're a product that the geek in me feels like I should want, but I have absolutely no actual use for. I plug in lots of stuff, but exactly 0% of it is something that there's even marginal value in remotely controlling. Electronics, computers, kitchen appliances, and so on, all of it is either always-on or there's no value at all in remotely controlling it. I guess I need more desk lamps or something?

The blinds I'd be excited about, especially since they're retrofit on existing blinds, except they appear to only be for roller blinds, and my house is very much a mini-blind house. Oh well.

Yep. The few things I have that are plug-in that I would want remotely controllable have better solutions.

Lamps? I can just put in a smart bulb, so I can change the color and dimming as well as on/off.

Portable/window air conditioner? Either get one that is itself remote-controllable or get a plug-in control box so I can move it between outlets with the air conditioner?

Seasonal light displays? Again, a plug-in one so I can move it around; no reason to make one outlet remote-controllable that I use only for Christmas, and a second outlet remote-controllable that I only use for Halloween, when I can just get a plug-in controller instead.

The smart light switch is far more interesting, because I have multiple “multiple light bulb” circuits that I only really care about on/off and dimming, but they’re all multi-switch units, and so far only Lutron Caseta is able to handle 3-switch systems, and it isn’t Matter. (My home WiFi network is an absolute nightmare as it is, I really don’t want to add more WiFi devices when the Matter standard now exists.)

And I know Eve handles Matter well, they added it to my Eve Aqua hose controller, and I’ve used it successfully this last summer.

 

[Seoras]

Struggling to think of anything other than my coffee machine that I want to have remote, or even timed, control off.
Ah! Just had an idea... I could change all the outlets in my teenage sons bedroom for these.
That way when he's exceeded his cave/screen time we can turn off eveything in that room.
Awesome. Xmas it is for us, not him... 😈

 

[antnythr]

What is with the pricing of these smart devices? $50 for a plug outlet or a light switch?

 

[WilliamG]

I don't really understand the point of smart outlets, either. That said, I do have a bunch of the TP-Link Smart Plugs, in HomeKit etc. Why? Because I nerd out on the energy monitoring aspect of them. For that, they're worth it. For turning stuff on and off? Na.

 

[Surrylic]

I plug in lots of stuff, but exactly 0% of it is something that there's even marginal value in remotely controlling. Electronics, computers, kitchen appliances, and so on, all of it is either always-on or there's no value at all in remotely controlling it. I guess I need more desk lamps or something?

Yeah… I bought a pack of four because I needed one (lols) and after a year I’ve found uses for three of them.

I use one for a lamp because my wife doesn’t want a smart bulb on her nightstand (we’ve had issues with ours over the years and she doesn’t want to deal with that while half asleep at bedtime). I have a knock off MagSafe dock that I’m happy to use while sitting next to, but I don’t fully trust overnight. And an odd one - our TV freezes up from time to time and you can only fix it by unplugging it, so we use a smart plug for that (instead of getting a ladder every time).

I wish I had useful suggestions for you haha

 

[Jzvm]

If/when I get a home battery for outages some day, I may get a Span panel to control which circuits use the limited battery capacity. The problems are that installing a Span panel can cost $10k and some of my circuits cover all outlets in multiple rooms. My modem and router are on a circuits with multiple bedrooms.

I could install smart outlets and switches for less than a Span panel and I could leave on only the outlets that are critical during an outage.

But I probably won’t get a home battery and I probably won’t install a ton of smart outlets and switches because losing power for a couple of days a year is not really worth it.

 

[McWetty]

I use smart outlets very infrequently, but they do have a use. I use them to control the overhead lighting ballasts in my basement. A motion sensor turns them on as I walk in and off when I leave. Saves me from having to use the pull cords on 4 ballasts.

 

[mattyj2001]

Smart outlets are funny, because they're a product that the geek in me feels like I should want, but I have absolutely no actual use for. I plug in lots of stuff, but exactly 0% of it is something that there's even marginal value in remotely controlling. Electronics, computers, kitchen appliances, and so on, all of it is either always-on or there's no value at all in remotely controlling it. I guess I need more desk lamps or something?

The blinds I'd be excited about, especially since they're retrofit on existing blinds, except they appear to only be for roller blinds, and my house is very much a mini-blind house. Oh well.

We're in the process of going solar, where saving every last bit of electricity is a good thing. Knowing that I have a toaster over that trickles out power even when it's not on would be useful. Turn off all your unused outlets overnight when you'll never use them and they won't contribute to backup battery drain (unless the outlets themselves drain, which I'm guessing they do.) Would be interesting to see what the tradeoff is, and if the outlet itself would save wasted trickle on a given appliance.

 

[ds2000]

Smart outlets are funny, because they're a product that the geek in me feels like I should want, but I have absolutely no actual use for. I plug in lots of stuff, but exactly 0% of it is something that there's even marginal value in remotely controlling. Electronics, computers, kitchen appliances, and so on, all of it is either always-on or there's no value at all in remotely controlling it. I guess I need more desk lamps or something?

The blinds I'd be excited about, especially since they're retrofit on existing blinds, except they appear to only be for roller blinds, and my house is very much a mini-blind house. Oh well.

Its all about use cases. For instance, I work from home so all my tech runs through a smartplug that I monitor. I can then charge back all my electrical costs to my company.
Its also incredible to see that the M1 max pretty much runs on thin air. I quite like that when I leave the room after work, within 5 minutes all the lights, desk dock, charger, screens etc are completely off.

 

[Jason_9]

I stopped buying this **** when companies left and right started not supporting older devices or changing terms of service after the fact.

 

[Makosuke]

I have a knock off MagSafe dock that I’m happy to use while sitting next to, but I don’t fully trust overnight. And an odd one - our TV freezes up from time to time and you can only fix it by unplugging it, so we use a smart plug for that (instead of getting a ladder every time).

I love that these are both actual useful things to do with a smart plug (and even things for which an installed smart outlet is better than an add-on one), but also really awful, because both of them are necessitated by bad technology.

Its all about use cases. For instance, I work from home so all my tech runs through a smartplug that I monitor. I can then charge back all my electrical costs to my company.

This is true, but you're really just using it for monitoring in that case, not the remote control and automation features, which is not its main advertised use case. There are plenty of devices--smart and dumb--that will monitor power use passively, and plenty of good things to do with those, like the example you give.

I personally pretty much always check parasitic and/or average power draw using a Kill-A-Watt meter when I get something that's going to live plugged in, so I know what it's really doing.

And having a smart device-scale meter could in some cases detect a problem earlier than other ways--for example, if your refrigerator was using increasing amounts of power despite the room temperature remaining the same, something is probably failing on it. But again, that's only monitoring, not control.

Turn off all your unused outlets overnight when you'll never use them and they won't contribute to backup battery drain (unless the outlets themselves drain, which I'm guessing they do.) Would be interesting to see what the tradeoff is, and if the outlet itself would save wasted trickle on a given appliance.

These outlets absolutely do use power, they have to maintain a wireless connection, log data, and listen for commands. How much they use is a different question, and ironically hard to measure since it's hardwired to the wall, so you can't just plug one meter into another to see what it's using. The specifications for the wall-wart style smart plug from Eve say "<1W", which is a pretty vague number (is it 0.9W or 0.009W?), but at least puts an upper bound on what you could theoretically save by automatically disconnecting something with high parasitic power draw.

The only device in my house that has high enough parasitic draw to be worth turning off when not in use is my subwoofer, at around 8W, but I only use it every couple of weeks, so I just turn the switch on the back on and off the old-fashioned way.

 

[centauratlas]

Given how unreliable the Eve Energies have been for me, I wouldn't want something I had to hard wire. Updates have been flaky, and they sometimes have to be unplugged to reset them. It just seems like a big risk to have something wired that doesn't work reliably. Not to mention, what happens when they abandon it?

 

[Arsenikdote]

Yep. The few things I have that are plug-in that I would want remotely controllable have better solutions.

Lamps? I can just put in a smart bulb, so I can change the color and dimming as well as on/off.

Portable/window air conditioner? Either get one that is itself remote-controllable or get a plug-in control box so I can move it between outlets with the air conditioner?

Seasonal light displays? Again, a plug-in one so I can move it around; no reason to make one outlet remote-controllable that I use only for Christmas, and a second outlet remote-controllable that I only use for Halloween, when I can just get a plug-in controller instead.

The smart light switch is far more interesting, because I have multiple “multiple light bulb” circuits that I only really care about on/off and dimming, but they’re all multi-switch units, and so far only Lutron Caseta is able to handle 3-switch systems, and it isn’t Matter. (My home WiFi network is an absolute nightmare as it is, I really don’t want to add more WiFi devices when the Matter standard now exists.)

And I know Eve handles Matter well, they added it to my Eve Aqua hose controller, and I’ve used it successfully this last summer.

I completely agree that the controllers that plug into a regular outlet are FAR better than an integrated one not only because you can move it around, but also because a product failure is a much simple thing to replace.

I don't really understand the point of smart outlets, either. That said, I do have a bunch of the TP-Link Smart Plugs, in HomeKit etc. Why? Because I nerd out on the energy monitoring aspect of them. For that, they're worth it. For turning stuff on and off? Na.

Yeah… I bought a pack of four because I needed one (lols) and after a year I’ve found uses for three of them.

I use one for a lamp because my wife doesn’t want a smart bulb on her nightstand (we’ve had issues with ours over the years and she doesn’t want to deal with that while half asleep at bedtime). I have a knock off MagSafe dock that I’m happy to use while sitting next to, but I don’t fully trust overnight. And an odd one - our TV freezes up from time to time and you can only fix it by unplugging it, so we use a smart plug for that (instead of getting a ladder every time).

I wish I had useful suggestions for you haha

Smart outlets are funny, because they're a product that the geek in me feels like I should want, but I have absolutely no actual use for. I plug in lots of stuff, but exactly 0% of it is something that there's even marginal value in remotely controlling. Electronics, computers, kitchen appliances, and so on, all of it is either always-on or there's no value at all in remotely controlling it. I guess I need more desk lamps or something?

The blinds I'd be excited about, especially since they're retrofit on existing blinds, except they appear to only be for roller blinds, and my house is very much a mini-blind house. Oh well.

I use them quite a bit. I didn't for the longest while because I too was like "....but why?" However, now I use them extensively. Most of it is related to nighttime lighting. I use them because I have now installed multiple LED strip lights around my house. I also have installed some decorative lights in a couple rooms in my house. In most cases there was no "smart" version of these products or if there was they were 5-10x more expensive. Using the smart outlets was a simple solution to solve the problem. Quick example, I have a few things I hung on the wall in my house for decoration. They look great during the day, but are hard to see at night. I purchased a fairly cheap but nice looking light that mounts above the picture and illuminates it quite well. The cord is very tiny and easily tucks behind the frame and then goes to the edge of the wall and down to the outlet. If I wanted to I could likely even tape and paint over it. However, I don't want or need it on except when the sun goes down. I plugged it into a smart outlet controller and now HomeKit turns it on a half hour after sunset and turns it off at midnight. We have many other similar style uses where it helps control lights that I only want on for very small periods of the evening and are not the standard E26 socket lights. Many people might not have a use for them, like I used to be, but once you have a use case, they are amazing little gadgets that enable otherwise "dumb" devices to be controlled exactly the way you would want them.

 

[ChrisA]

Smart outlets are funny, because they're a product that the geek in me feels like I should want, but I have absolutely no actual use for.

Floor lamps. room dehumidifiers and fans are common things people use these for. Most people do have lamps

I have a few uncommon uses, I have a computer that drives a 3D printer in a remote location. Prints sometimes take 5 or even 8 hours. I like to turn off the printers, computers and the lights. (lights are needed so I can stream video of the printing process) the other uncommon use is a light used by my pet turtle. I use the smart plug as a light timer, but one that follows sunset and sunrise, not the time of day.

I prefer to use smart lights and only use smart switches and plugs if the lighting fixture can't use smart bulbs.

 

[wmy5]

Is the Eve Light Switch the same hardware as the existing one but now with Matter support? I hope they will provide a firmware update to current Eve Light Switch users to enable Matter for them as well.

 

[guzhogi]

I'd be interested in seeing a smart version of this outlet. Two regular plugs, and also two USB-C charging ports.

 

[nuckinfutz]

If/when I get a home battery for outages some day, I may get a Span panel to control which circuits use the limited battery capacity. The problems are that installing a Span panel can cost $10k and some of my circuits cover all outlets in multiple rooms. My modem and router are on a circuits with multiple bedrooms.

I could install smart outlets and switches for less than a Span panel and I could leave on only the outlets that are critical during an outage.

But I probably won’t get a home battery and I probably won’t install a ton of smart outlets and switches because losing power for a couple of days a year is not really worth it.

I like SPAN as much as anyone but the reality is multi-national companies like Schneider, Leviton and Eaton already have smart breakers. They're going to eventually end up the more flexible and cheaper option. My preference would be for the vendor with the least amount of reliance on cloud services and decent ESS support. You should be able to affordably purchase 30Khw of battery/ESS. That's around what the typical home uses in a day so if you lose power and only go with the essentials you should get a couple of days of life out of the battery.

I agree the smart outlets are just really niche. The only ones in my home are connected to white noise generators that I like to be able to put on a schedule.

The reality for energy is this. Energy efficient appliances will go farther in reducing consumption than cutting off vampire power. A modestly insulated home with an efficient HVAC system and water heater is going to have a large impact the trick of course is not needing to sell a body part to afford them.

 

[bondjw07]

Why no link to the press release? Just a random link to their website that has no info on the products.

 

[jsalda]

If/when I get a home battery for outages some day, I may get a Span panel to control which circuits use the limited battery capacity. The problems are that installing a Span panel can cost $10k and some of my circuits cover all outlets in multiple rooms. My modem and router are on a circuits with multiple bedrooms.

I could install smart outlets and switches for less than a Span panel and I could leave on only the outlets that are critical during an outage.

But I probably won’t get a home battery and I probably won’t install a ton of smart outlets and switches because losing power for a couple of days a year is not really worth it.

In my area, for $10k I can get a natural gas generator that will power my entire house. No batteries, no Span panel, barely a flicker when the power goes out and the generator kicks in.

 

[Makosuke]

I completely agree that the controllers that plug into a regular outlet are FAR better than an integrated one not only because you can move it around, but also because a product failure is a much simple thing to replace.

True, but on the other hand something that doesn't stick out of the wall can be useful, and at minimum it certainly looks cleaner--I have a couple of USB-port-included outlets, which are pleasingly tidy. The amount of work to replace it if it breaks is probably relative to how used to replacing outlets you are; it's not as easy as just plugging in a new one, but it's also not all that much harder for something that should last a decade.

I use them quite a bit. I didn't for the longest while because I too was like "....but why?" However, now I use them extensively. Most of it is related to nighttime lighting. I use them because I have now installed multiple LED strip lights around my house. I also have installed some decorative lights in a couple rooms in my house. In most cases there was no "smart" version of these products or if there was they were 5-10x more expensive.

This is a good use-case, and I kind of alluded to it with my comment that "I guess I need more desk lamps or something?" It's not that there aren't any good uses of smart plugs, just that there are a lot less than it feels like there should be, since most plugged-in things have no value in having that plug be automated.

Lighting products seem like by far the biggest one--on/off and don't mind being randomly unplugged to turn off--especially things (like LED strips) that couldn't also be served by putting a smart bulb in the same lamp (although I could imagine that having your choice of dumb lightbulb with a smart plug might be cheaper and have more options than a smart bulb in a dumb plug).

In my house personally, though, I literally have one plugged-in bedside lamp, everything else is a fixture. Obviously that's not true for everyone.