B-hyve

And now it’s only thing I want to use. It just works. You don’t have to close the app and re-open it to reconnect in the middle of adjusting sprayheads. Rain Bird losing its connection Every time I set my phone down for 20 seconds. Doesn’t work for me. Also, it doesn’t work for me that they have an article that basically tells us we have to get used to that they don’t plan on correcting the problem. The fact that the b-hyve app has a easy to find space to provide feedback is why it all works so well. And that’s important to me. I’ve got to figure out how to get orbit to start making controllers to Take 30 zones. I’ll be forced to use others for anything over 16 zones. also I love being able to take a picture to illustrate each zone because describing a front yard big enough for two football fields. It’s hard to describe which set of rotors in the front yard. You’re talking about.. Rainbird only allows you to take a picture for program a and one picture for program B etc. so they just look cute but the pictures aren’t helpful unless you can take one for each zone. Totally perfect. good job developers. Also, I love being able to set run time with one click. If I need to make a few of them a little less time I can, but it’s so much faster being able to do that.

I use this app on the Orbit B-Hyve XR and it works as it should for daily watering but the interval watering does not work. I set the unit up to water my trees every two weeks and when the time to water comes, nothing happens. I contacted Ortbit customer service and they said I needed to set the “interval start date.” Well in the app that I have, there is no interval start date. There is a “program start date” but apparently that’s not the same thing. So then they directed me to my online account where I could set the interval start date. The online account is not easy to navigate and I feel turned off at this point anyway because this should be in the app, but I digress. Once I set the start date and go back to the app to finish setup and try to set enter start time, the app crashes (every time). So I think maybe I can put the start time in the online account, makes sense right? Well there is no place in the online account to enter the start time. At this point, I am ready to pull my hair out. I have 32 trees in my yard and because I can’t do interval watering, this unit is useless to me. The customer service person said they would submit a bug report but how long is that going to take to fix? Unless I can do interval watering I am going to have to return this unit. App developers, please fix this problem!!

There are some bugs, crashing, wrong data shown, and it can get pretty frustrating. However the app generally works and has a nice look to it. Some things are hard to find, like the watering history is hidden inside settings, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I had to ask customer support why the watering days were all wrong in the calendar when I just started to use the device—they said the app is only designed to give you an accurate next day watering schedule. So even though the calendar seemed to show almost every day All zones being watered, that was not a reflection on what the watering schedule will actually be. This is Day 2 and yes they seem to be correct that only the next day seems to be displayed correctly. If I go off that, the watering schedule seems ok based on the number of days between watering that the app estimates for my zones. Anyway I hope they continue to improve the app as it is a very cool thing to be able to adjust watering automatically based on your yard’s conditions and plants. It was a little work to set up my zones because my plants don’t match up with the plant types in the app but I think I found enough information in their help topics that I was able to select a close enough type for my needs in each zone that I have. It’s also got slider adjustments if you want to increase or decrease the frequency and volume of watering like if you don’t particularly like their presets. Overall a good app and generally works. Keep fixing the bugs!