Eve Home Issues
/ 4 min read
Table of Contents
I really want to like the Eve Home products. Their iOS app looks nice, I especially dig their charts design. Their products integrate with HomeKit, but they also added Matter support and are picking up Home Assistant support. Unfortunately, I ran into quite a few issues with their Eve Thermo (ET) and Eve Thermo Control (ETC) products. In this post I’d like to document these problems and track if their dev and support teams will be able to sort them out.
In theory the idea of Eve Thermo (+ Control) is great. The Eve Thermo is a smart valve for heating radiators. They try to tweak how far the valve needs to be opened based on the room temperature. The problem is of course with the valve being directly at the radiator, it’s not representative of the actual room temperature. The control unit (ETC) tries to solve this: You position it somewhere to measure the temperature at a suitable spot in the room and it lets the smart valves know if that temperature was reached or not.
In practice though, there are so many issues with it that I’d consider it dysfunctional at the moment. I wouldn’t recommend buying them until they sort this out.
App doesn’t show the Eve Thermo Control temperature
To set up a room with an ET and ETC, you combine them in the app. However, once you link the ETC unit to an ET at a radiator, it no longer shows the room temperature of the ETC (reading at the spot of the room you’d like to use as a reference for the temperature to reach), but the temperature of the ET unit at the radiator (which is of course too warm there).
This is sometimes hard to recognize in rooms with a single ET and ETC, but it gets obvious if you set up a room with multiple ETs with one ETC: The temperature charts of the group (supposed to be the ETC reading) matches the chart of the first ET reading at the radiator.
Eve Thermo Control heating status error
ETCs show an icon in the lower right which should usually indicate if heating currently is off (empty icon) or on (icon filled with some waves). This seems to work only for a few minutes after setup or when adjusting the temperature on the ETC. After some time this always switches to an icon variant with an exclamation mark, indicating that there is a communication problem between the ETs and ETC. Some redditors report that Eve Home acknowledged “that there is a bug and the temperature of the Eve Thermo Control is getting overwritten by the Eve Thermo”. This seems to be the main problem why the whole setup doesn’t seem to be working. It means the main feature they are selling this for is broken!
The target temperature set on the Eve Thermo Control doesn’t get reached
This problem is related to the root cause of the above one. Because the temperature reading of the ET at the radiator (which is too high compared to the overall room temperature) overwrites the one from the ETC, the checks in place to close valves trigger too early.
Eve Thermos become unresponsive after a few weeks
The first time this happened I thought the batteries died since I had them installed for almost a year. I replaced all batteries and they came up again. Only later I found threads on reddit where users had the exact same problem (popping up around the same time). Turns out it’s not the batteries but the Eve Thermos just get unresponsive and only pulling the batteries out and back in fixes it. Which is great fun if you have 10+ Eve Thermos. This happened again after a while since then. The app doesn’t report any errors so you might miss that they are bricked again. In some cases this can result in wasting quite some energy when they get unresponsive with open valves. Which of course is the complete opposite of their main purpose. The weird thing is also that this happens to all ETs at once, not just individual ones.
So that’s where I’m at at the moment. I’ll keep you updated, if there’s any progress or feedback/acknowledgement from Eve Home’s side. I wish they had a more open support website where you could track known issues.