Bluetooth Water Timer 2 Zone, Diivoo Smart Irrigation

Diivoo Wifi dual zone water timer - Outstanding produc
I don’t generally bother to write reviews on Amazon, as I find the products I usually purchase are either rubbish from the East that I expect to be rubbish, or mainstream items that I buy from Amazon for convenience. In this particular case, I felt obliged to write a review because I am very impressed with this product and I went through a fair amount of trial and error in this product category before I found this one.

Aesthetically, the product is fairly chunky and it could be argued it looks a bit boring, although I think it’s quite attractive. There isn’t a great deal to the unit really, it has a single input and dual outputs. It’s fairly discrete once fitted and just goes about its business without any fuss. It seems solidly built and it was easy to get a good solid fit on the tap. The unit has two yellow arrows, each pointing to one of the outputs. These buttons, in combination with a setting in the phone app are a really neat addition. There is a field within the schedule app called ‘Countdown’ and those buttons activate the zone for the period of time configured within that setting. I found this to be really useful and thought it was very elegantly implemented. In response to a couple of other reviews suggesting the unit is ‘noisy’, I’m not sure what that’s about, but all I can hear is the tap running when mine is active. I haven’t had the product long enough to comment on longevity, but so far it looks solid. I will ensure there is no water inside before I take it inside for Winter to prevent damage.

The second part of this product is the gateway, which you will need to plug into a wall socket near-ish to the timer which will connect via Bluetooth to your timer and wirelessly to your home network, which will allow you to control the timer via the Internet whilst away from home. There is a little configuration to be done when taking the items out of the box for the first time, but I found this to be relatively pain free and haven’t had to re-visit since.

Once the gateway and timer are configured, you can then move onto the phone application ‘Smart Life’. It appears this application works with products of all different shapes and sizes and by the look of it, is nothing to do with Diivoo specifically, it looks like this product just works with that particular app. The app is pretty nice overall, it has a fairly simple layout and has a ‘left’ and a ‘right’ side, which ties in with the zone arrangement on the device itself and so it is very straightforward to know which is which. There are a few nice little design touches which I appreciated – at the very top of the timer screen, it shows the battery level of the timer itself, whether the zones are active or idle and a little weather forecast for the week ahead, which whilst not ground-breaking, was a thoughtful addition.

From the application, you can activate/deactivate the zones with the touch of a button, set the amount of time the physical buttons on the device water for (independently), configure timed or cyclical schedules, snow/rain delays and then it also shows the next and most recent irrigation times, which is also helpful. The schedules themselves are really flexible and this was the main reason I bought the unit. I had sown some new grass seed and it was 35degrees and so frequent but short watering was essential – something the majority of the units I found could not do, or at least not to this level of granularity. It was very easy to configure a schedule to water only within the hours of 8am to 8pm every hour for 3 minutes. If the weather cooled, I could reduce this easily. I coupled this timer with a few of Gardena’s ‘pin hole’ hoses, which perfectly moistened my grass seed without causing puddles. I am convinced these two products together are the only reason my seed was able to grow during the record breaking UK heatwave of Summer 2022.

The application is also smart enabled and this means that you could integrate it with a multitude of IoT applications to water depending on the weather in your area (or a plethora of other triggers, if you’re that way inclined). Or connect to Google assistant etc to water on command. Whatever takes your fancy. I set up the voice controlled activation because I could, more than anything else – it was cool to show off but that’s about it. I could see value in the weather dependent activation though, if you were away from home, for example.

If there’s one minor thing I would change, it would be that the Andoid app tries to be too clever with schedules and will prevent you from creating two schedules with conflicting times. In itself, that is sensible, but the issue comes when you want to have many schedules for different purposes and only enable them when you need them. The way the application currently is, you would have to change/delete the original so that the times do no conflict. It’s an inconvenience, but that is the fault of the app itself, which isn’t even developed by Diivoo as far as I understand.

Overall, this is one of the best products I’ve found on Amazon in the past few years. As a water timer, it is well made, simple and yet very flexible when accompanies by the phone app and gateway. Had there been one, I’d have preferred a 4 zone model, as that would have meant I could replace my perfectly functioning, but less feature-rich Orbit 4 zone model, which whilst very effective, does look a bit of an eyesore with the solenoid units and the wires. I’ll probably add a second Diivoo unit next Summer, which will cover all of my needs. I would recommend the Gardena 4 way manifold which has a good spacing between the ports and feels solid.