H5040 gateway+ 1 sensors

Last year after having major water leaks, I bought several of these sensors and this week after over a year, this saved another major disaster. One of them went off and although water was not visible, there was a small leak under the fridge that actually damaged the wood. The sensors are very sensitive and even a drop of liquid causes alerts. Unfortunately, I can’t put one under the fridge and had one next to it. Then I got paranoid and went to check my water heater and guess what? The tray was full of water because of a pipe leak. The water was not outside the tray so that is why that sensor did not go off. I was lucky to check the water heater! Another disaster prevented. I highly recommend these.

I use Govee smart products in my house so to maintain consistent Agency I chose this product. So far it’s worked well when I’ve tested it. I haven’t had any catastrophic leaks, but I’m confident that it will work. As a suggestion underneath the sink, you need to have a rubber mat that has at least 1 inch side balls to catch the initial leak while the alarm goes off it buys you time till you can shut the water off.

I have other GoVee products so bought this to be able to use the same app. Function wise it works great. There are two weaknesses I see. First off, when it is triggered, it sends a notification in the app. I had tested it when I first got it but failed to clear the alert. So, when it was actually triggered by spraying water from my sump pump, the alert did not go off because it was stuck with the old one. I guess you can't have two alerts at a time? Second, it is not loud enough. We have these down in our basement and if you are on a second floor room (like when you are sleeping in the middle of the night) you can not hear it. My wife only heard it go off when she was walking by the basement door. Of course if the notification has worked properly, I would have known right away. Thankfully it must have not been going off for long as not that much water had accumulated. My tip is to check the devices int he app to make sure they are online and working. I also noticed that the synch module goes offline a lot though I think that has to do with my WiFi. Because this only works with 2.4ghz, I had to connect it to my Guest network as opposed to my Wifi 6 normal connection. The 2.4ghz seems to catch interference a lot and go down, but it does come back online and the device connects back with no issue. Thankfully I don't have to reconnect it every time it happens.

Recent flooding in our area drove the need for these. Placed them in our basement so we can be alerted early to any problems. Set-up was relatively easy although it did take a few times for the Wi-Fi to connect. Placed the bridge in the basement and our Wi-Fi router is on the main floor. So far, no connectivity issues. App is pretty straight-forward for set-up and monitoring.

Update 10/7Govee got back to me. If this Support Engineer's description and troubleshooting steps are right, no one should buy this kit at this time. First off, if you use an Eero, as I said before, it won't work out of the box and it requires a support call to them to disable 5GHz (shame on you Eero for not making that a user toggle, BTW).But here's the issue -- look at #6(A). The password recommendation is 8 characters, numbers and letters only. From what I can tell so far, that isn't a temporary thing. If you want Govee to stay on your network, you have to basically give your WiFi the security of a piece of Swiss cheese. No WiFi password in this day and age should be 8 characters. With access to a botnet or AWS instance farm, a WarDriver or your neighborhood script kiddie will have it cracked in minutes, or in the best case for them, a couple of days. This is unacceptable and I don't know how this could have scored an 'Amazon's Choice' banner with that level of insecurity.I've responded asking if there is a way to reload the firmware on the device and if they have anything in a Beta stage that could be tested to resolve these issues. If not, this is getting returned.Here are Govee's troubleshooting steps and notes:If the gateway is unable to connect to WiFi, please follow this troubleshooting:(1) If the mobile phone WLAN/Wi-Fi switch is not turned on during setup, there is no WiFi list selection, please go to the phone settings page to re-open the mobile phone WLAN/Wi-Fi until the prompt disappears.(2) In the WiFi setting interface of the APP, please fill in the your home WiFi account and password correctly. If you need to switch WiFi, please do not choose the WiFi named "Govee_gateway_XXXX";(3) Please check if the network standard is 5G network, please switch to 2.4G network standard and restart the router. (No supports 5G)If the router supports dual-frecuency, please turn off 5GHz before connecting:)(4) Please check if the WiFi network is normal. Please use the mobile phone to connect to the WiFi network to confirm that the network communication is normal.(5) Please check if the WiFi network account and password are correct or not, and enter the correct account and password to reconnect.(6) If the WiFi account number and password are not compatible, please mo-dify them to a simple (number and letter combination) account and password before connecting.A. The password length is recommended to be 8 digits. There can't be any special symbols (eg: '=&<>"" {}) in the WIFI name and password.B. If the router has the anti-mite network function enabled, please disable it.C.Please chan-ge the encryption method in the router settings to TKIP&AES;D. Due to the difference of routers, if the above methods can not solve the problem, please restart the router or chan-ge a router to have a try;(7) When APP prompts you to connect a WiFi starting with Govee_gateway_XXXX, and you can't find it in the WLAN setting, please check if the light on the gateway is flashing slowly blue or not. If not, press long the WiFi pairing key for 3 seconds until the blue indicator light flashes slowly.(8) If the router is not compatible with the device, please use the mobile phone hotspot to connect.(9) Please turn on GPS/location and Bluetooth.(10) Please log in to the router and enter its security settings interface to disable Mac address filtering.(11) As for IOS, please note that there will be an extra blank, please de-lete it when you enter WIFI password, thank you!(12) One example from our customer: complete setup if I disabled mobile data connection on my phone.Gateway to WIFI: https://youtu.be/m_A_4Fg0Jd0Update 10/4I spent over an hour on the phone with Eero Support working through this and they turned off the 5GHz band completely, and the gateway still wouldn't connect, and they never saw it try to connect during the setup process. Still haven't heard back from Govee despite two requests within the app and multiple emails directly to Support. About to return this.I had high hopes for this little kit, and it looked like it was precisely what I needed. I read the reviews and ignored the negatives thinking 'surely, in a network as well built and modern as mine, there won't be issues, after all, I've not had any problems with other 2.4GHz only devices'. Don't make that mistake.It seems that this system works if you have a 1994 WiFi setup with horrible security, no band steering and don't use a mesh of any sort. If your WiFi setup is in any wise modern, don't bother. I don't generally say flat-out to not buy a product, but I have yet to get something even close to working or get a response from the company.I run an Eero Pro configuration and have terrific WiFi throughout the house. The system supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously, with band steering technology in place. The WiFi 5040 gateway Govee has built simply will NOT connect to it, no matter what I do. I have other 2.4GHz only devices, some of them pretty old, that work flawlessly with Eero. I don't think it's an AP/Mesh problem, it looks to be a client problem entirely.I thought it was the password being too complex, based on some reviews that said simplifying their password helped. Turned on Guest access with a horrific password, and it didn't make any difference.Thought maybe the beta band steering I have enabled was causing an issue, so I turned that off and started again. Nope, no dice.I happen to have a mobile hotspot that operates in a fixed 2.4GHz band for WiFi, still wouldn't connect to that, though I'm still suspecting that connection issue is related to the complex password I have on that device, but it's too troublesome to change that for me to keep troubleshooting.Support? They don't reply if I log a problem via the app or an email, so I can't really say they have good or bad support, because from my perspective they have NO support.What's so painful to me is I'd be willing to help them figure out what's going on if they'd only respond. I work in the tech space, and troubleshooting these sorts of things is something I do all the time. As it is I'm going to have to explore other solutions.