The success of simple, all-in-one smart-home programs like SimpliSafe has led to a flood of rivals trying to muscle into the market. These have achieved various levels of success, however they have a tendency to have one factor in widespread: They’re filth low cost.
Aqara is the newest model to throw its hat into this ring, with its Aqara Smart Home Starter Kit. This Zigbee-based, Apple HomeKit-compatible system consists of 5 elements. At the middle is the Aqara Hub, a chunky disc that connects on to wall energy. As the brains of the system, the hub harbors a Wi-Fi bridge (2.4GHz solely) and an onboard siren.
This assessment is a part of TechHive’s protection of the best smart home systems, the place you’ll discover critiques of competing merchandise, plus a purchaser’s information to the options it’s best to take into account when buying.
Two sensors—a door/window sensor and a movement sensor—are included within the field. You additionally get a primary sensible plug and a single-button wi-fi swap that you need to use for numerous management operations. The {hardware} is all utilitarian in design however surprisingly compact and unobtrusive. Only the outsized sensible plug fails to slot in with the remainder of the group.
The utility of the Aqara sensible plug is proscribed by its giant measurement.
Setup takes place by the Aqara Home app, although should you’ve received an Apple gadget useful it’s also possible to set issues up with HomeKit. Aqara and HomeKit have a barely rocky integration, and in my testing the Aqara app didn’t import any of my HomeKit settings (resembling room names), nor did it incorporate different HomeKit gadgets on my community inside the app. Conversely, the Aqara gear did efficiently present up within the iOS Home app.
Christopher Null / IDGThe scattered Aqara Home interface tries to jam every part onto one display, and it type of succeeds.
After strolling by some easy setup directions to convey the Hub on-line, Aqara proceeds to attach the sensors and different equipment robotically. This was one thing of a shock to me, as I had but to even take away the plastic tab that engages the batteries to energy them up.
The app doesn’t even direct you to do that, however all of the sensors (that are presumably pre-paired) however present up within the Aqara Home app. Once I powered up the sensors and linked the sensible plug, every part grew to become energetic within the Aqara Home app, efficiently paired and able to work. One oddity: Aqara additionally robotically paired a sensible mild bulb to my app—though no bulb is included within the starter equipment.
Aqara’s app doesn’t provide probably the most intuitive of interfaces, and it’s exhausting to inform at first look whether or not its major operate is meant to be a safety system or a extra normal system for controlling sensible gadgets. The reply, in fact, is each. Aqara desires to be a bit of little bit of every part, telling you whether or not the door is open, how a lot mild is within the room (there’s a luminance sensor constructed into the movement sensor), whether or not the sensible plug is turned on, and whether or not the alarm is enabled—suddenly. There’s not plenty of rhyme or purpose to any of this, although should you don’t have too many sensors and equipment (the hub maxes out in supporting 32 anyway), it’s not troublesome to get a way of the system’s standing at a look.
Putting all of this to productive use is one other matter, and it rapidly turns into clear that Aqara has plenty of rising as much as do, significantly as a safety answer. Let’s begin there, as a result of the safety features of Aqara are terribly undercooked. By default, Aqara units up a rule that sounds the alarm if movement is detected or if the door/window sensor is tripped—which is a good begin, however that’s actually all it might do. There’s no timer system that engages the alarm after a minute whenever you’re leaving the home, and no keypad for guests to disable the alarm once they arrive.
AqaraThe Aqara Hub can even operate as a nightlight.
The included sensible button is at the very least preprogrammed to be used to show the alarm on and off (in addition to the sensible plug, oddly, relying on the quantity and size of button presses), however this doesn’t strike this reviewer as a function that provides any degree of actual safety. The siren is sort of tame even at most quantity, and the inclusion of assorted sound results (resembling “ghost calls”) feels frivolous relatively than safe and comforting. There’s no battery or mobile backup function, both: The entire system will be disabled by merely unplugging the hub. While Aqara does ship push notifications, it ought to in all probability go with out saying that there are not any skilled monitoring options accessible, both. As safety programs go, it’s merely not a lot of a deterrent.
On the plus facet, Aqara features a curious, graph-based logging system for these trying to hold tabs on issues. If you wish to see when movement was detected, you will get an hour-by-hour have a look at exercise and drill down from there to get specifics. A “smart logs” part, buried within the Profile tab, combines logs for all of your gadgets right into a single web page should you really need extra element.
AqaraThe Aqara hub can operate as a sensible house controller, evening mild, and native alarm, however you may hyperlink solely 32 gadgets to it and it might’t connect with a 5GHz Wi-Fi community.
You can even leverage an if/then-based guidelines system to tie numerous elements collectively. If you wish to reprogram the button to manage the sensible swap solely, that it isn’t exhausting to do. Should you want extra complexity, Aqara sells a wide range of extra varieties of sensors, together with vibration, water leak, and temperature/humidity sensors, every for beneath $20. But it bears repeating that the hub can management solely 32 gadgets. Alexa and Google Assistant assist are additionally supposedly included, however Alexa was by no means capable of finding my Aqara gadgets in my testing.
For simply $130, the Aqara starter equipment compares favorably in value to competing gear from the likes of Abode and Simplisafe, and it’s an excellent worth contemplating the variety of sensors and equipment you get within the field. While it doesn’t benefit a strong advice at current, significantly as a safety answer, I do have some hope that future upgrades will at the very least educate it a number of new tips.