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"Moen's intuitive Flo helps you save water and protect yourself from costly leaks."

• Protects against catastrophic water damage

• Learn your water usage habits

• Provides valuable information on water consumption

• Great information dashboard

• Integrates with Amazon Alexa

• Requires a subscription for important benefits

• Leakage location cannot be recognized

• Cannot be connected to other home security systems

My first product review was the Current Cost ENVI Home Energy Monitor. That was nine years ago, and I've been studying television reviews intensively since then – but I've never got over having data on energy and resource consumption at hand. I'm still excited about it. When the people behind the Flo by Moen smart home water monitor (and also the leak detector!) Offered to install the device for this test, I took the chance.

It's a few months later now and I often wonder how I've ever lived without this clever device. Sure, it will detect a water leak, tell you about it, and even shut down your water pipe, but its capabilities go far beyond these basic functions. It's not perfect, but between the practical daily use and the security it offers, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Mother Earth will surely appreciate this because there is not only an incentive to save money by using Flo by Moen, but also the more profound gesture to help the planet by saving water.

Why do i need that thing?

In the past two months, three of my homeowner friends have had installation problems that resulted in flooded land. Those who had good insurance were faced with a nasty deductible that didn't get a nasty bill, and in all cases the total cost of cleanup, repairs, and restoration exceeded $ 4,000.

In all three cases, Moen's $ 500 flo could have done practically none of these floods and damage. Reason enough to invest in Flo by Moen. It also monitors for leaks and, for a small monthly fee, identifies the water-consuming devices and fittings in your home. This way you get an insight – shower for shower, rinsing for rinsing and even washing machine load for washing machine load – into your home's water consumption. In any case, real money must be saved and not just a drop in the bucket. Over the course of his life, the Moen Flo could potentially save you thousands of dollars.

There is also the environmental good of water protection, which should not be underestimated.

installation

Flo by Moen is a small, weatherproof box with a valve button and incoming and outgoing connections that are connected to the main water pipe of your house. Practical people can install it themselves, but I would recommend hiring a plumber, especially if your water pipe is difficult to access. While contacting your plumber, you can also check if they are selling Flo by Moen as they may offer a discount on the purchase of the product and installation together.

There will come a time when you have to help the Flo to help you better.

Flo by Moen is not battery operated, so you need access to an electrical outlet. You should also make sure that your WiFi router's signal is strong enough to get to where the device is installed because there is no Ethernet port (not that an Ethernet cable is likely to be routed to the water pipe).

Once connected, Flo by Moen connects to Wi-Fi using the Flo by Moen app, available for iOS and Android. Once you're online, the app will ask you a number of questions to get you started. The app wants to know where your home is, how many people live in the house, the price per unit of water – all the data it can use to give you meaningful and informative dashboards.

From there, Flo by Moen will take water consumption at home into account and send this data to the cloud for processing via Flo by Moens Analytics.

What Flo does

In the first few days of operation, the Flo collects some basic data: how much water is consumed per day, when the consumption is highest and lowest, what the flow rate is for typical water consumption and how the water in the household is pressure and temperature measurement on average. The Flo also begins nightly tests for minor leaks by briefly turning off the water supply and monitoring for pressure changes. If the pressure drops, there is a leak somewhere. The Flo no longer recognizes where the leak is – it is intelligent, but does not have sensors in the entire sanitary system. So you have to go hunting yourself or call a plumber and have him sniff out.

With a feel for what is normal in your home, the Flo is equipped to understand what is not normal. If it sees that it is consuming too much water, a notification will be sent via SMS, email and / or phone call (you can choose one or all three notification options) to alert you. If notifications are not responded to, Flo will turn the water off, provided that it prevents potentially catastrophic damage or water loss. If you prefer, you can have Flo ignore the warning for two hours – something I had to do many, many times. More on that later.

The Moen Flo also looks for low pressure, indicating that there may be a problem with the water entering your home. water temperatures too low, which can be a warning that pipes can freeze; or too high pressure, which can be a sign of several problems (including already frozen pipes).

For those traveling on vacation or another long absence, an absence mode is available, which causes the Flo to react faster to warning signals.

But how does it really work?

Everything I've described so far is essentially automated, but there will come a time (probably actually many times) when you need to help the Flo do better to help you. Yes, as smart as the Flo is, it still needs an insight into what's actually happening in your home.

For example, watering my garden and / or lawn was a confusing event for the Flo. I have to admit that I was shocked that some drinking hoses let through up to 5 gallons of water per minute. But more importantly, Flo had never seen so much water in my home before – at least not for very long. While half of my vegetable garden was soaked with the much-needed hydration, Flo was busy letting me know that some nefarious things were coming down and warned of an impending water shutdown.

Flo not only protects my house from possible damage, but also prevents me from having to spend too much.

This scenario repeated itself several times, but I didn't know that every time I told the Flo app not to worry and keep pouring, Flo raised the ceiling for a shutdown event. This initially gave me cause for concern because what if the ceiling were raised so high that the Flo would be ineffective in the event of a real problem? It turned out that I didn't have to worry about it.

In addition to learning real-time usage habits, the Flo system allows users to assign usage events to certain types of usage, but only with a $ 5 FloProtect subscription. With the subscription it can be determined that the water consumption is at 1:10 p.m. On Thursday was the washing machine from which the Flo will likely learn to correctly allocate water consumption. This was practical for me as I was essentially able to tell the Flo device what applications were used for irrigation.

Today I have to blow up a good 57 gallons within 11 minutes before Flo warns me that I'm basically over-watering my garden. In this case, the Flo not only protects my house from possible damage, but also prevents me from over-watering and therefore paying too much when the water bill comes.

I have a huge bag of anecdotes praising the value of the Flo by Moen device, including stories of insanely long teenage showers that broke down after 25 minutes and overflowing bathtubs were barely averted, but I think you can imagine all kinds of cases In which a water monitor could be useful. Now we come to an even more convincing topic.

Get ready to save $$$

It may take a while to buy a used car with the money I saved with the Moen Flo, but I'm pretty sure this day could come. There are some real savings here.

Like any dashboard, the Flo by Moen app can be a real motivator. By setting water use goals and viewing reports of whether you have achieved or missed your goal, you tend to change your behavior (and that of others). In addition, it is instructive – and shocking in some cases – to see how much water is used to wash clothes or shower, for example, in a way that is difficult to describe.

"There's no way we're throwing so many gallons in our sinks," I cried in horror after checking my first monthly report. Unfortunately, our taps were our main consumers. They are still, but to a much lesser extent, since I installed water-saving aerators on every tap in the house. To be honest, I thought the existing aerators were highly efficient, and I wouldn't have known anything else without a detailed insight into my water consumption.

As convincing as saving may be, I think it may be more important to consider the positive effects of water conservation on our planet. Without realizing it, my kids had become a bit lazy turning off the faucet when brushing their teeth, and frankly it turned out that I was wasting a terrible amount of water washing up.

Treat the Flo by Moen app as a game, and conservation becomes a competition to find out who can save the most water. Given the high potential to save a valuable and sometimes scarce resource, I decided to give the Flo by Moen the Tech for Change Award from Digital Trends.

What's the catch?

The downside to many advantages of the Flo is that they live behind a FloProtect subscription paywall that costs $ 5 a month or $ 60 a year. With the subscription, you will also receive an insurance refund of up to $ 2,500 if water damage occurs under Flo's watch. This seems like a nice addition, but I'd rather see Moen bring that kind of support into the device for the $ 500 purchase price.

As long as I'm groaning, it would be great to see how Moen's Flo integrates with larger security systems to add an extra layer of protection. I personally have a Vivint home security system in operation that has flood sensors that can possibly detect water accumulations that the Flo cannot detect itself based on usage data. As it looks, the Flo is alone in its operation.

Our opinion

I love having the Moen Flo as part of my increasingly intelligent home. Not only do I feel like I have an extra layer of protection, I'm still moved by all the data I can get through well-designed dashboards. A little bit of manual work is required at the beginning, but the end result is an intuitive intelligent water monitoring system that more or less takes care of itself.

Is there a better alternative?

There are cheaper options, like Stream Labs' Smart Home Water Monitor for $ 200, which doesn't require pipe cutting like Flo by Moen, but we can't guarantee the accuracy of that. There are also more expensive options, like the Phyn Plus for $ 700, but it's unclear what valuable benefits the higher sticker price will bring. We also prefer the appearance of the Flo by Moen user interface.

How long it will take?

The Flo from Moen seems to be very robust and weatherproof, so the signs of a long life are good. However, since this is a new product category, it remains to be seen how realistic life expectancy will be. Given that most of the data processing and analysis is done in the cloud, there is a good chance that the technology will not be out of date in the short term.

Should you buy it

Yes. It performs well and offers a wealth of accurate data and solid protection.

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