The Good: The GoveeWiFi Water Sensor kit (2 Pack as reviewed) is a cheap and easy way to monitor critical areas where water damage is likely to occur. Setup is relatively simple* (bit asterisk here on the wifi portion of the setup). It is expandable and is sold in sets from one to five with the ability of hooking up to 10 to a single hub. Each sensor also has a 100 dB alarm built in which will alert you in the event of wifi connectivity failure. They also have leak sensors on both the bottom and top if you need to catch an area where water is likely to drip from above.
The Bad: The sensors are not wifi compatible on their own and require a hub. The hub only works with these Govee water sensors. Like most of Govee’s wifi lineup, this only works on 2.4GHz wifi.
Overall: The price is good enough for me to overlook the flaws. If you can get around the 2.4GHz wifi issue and have a suitable place to hide yet another single purpose hub in your house, these are some of the cheapest and most fully featured sensors on the market.
The GoveeWiFi Water Sensor kit is one of the few options available if you’re looking for water sensors without having to buy into a whole ecosystem like Wyze or Insteon (seriously stay the hell away from Insteon). With occasional deals and coupons showing up on Amazon all the time, you can get a two or three pack for $30-50, or about $12/sensor.
I found myself in need of new water sensors for my air handler and boiler room after Insteon had their corporate meltdown, shut down their servers, and then were reborn as a subscription company. Having bought other Govee products in the past I’m familiar with the products, the build quality and the app. Govee products tend to be more fully featured than other competing products, although the build quality can be hit or miss, and I’m usually willing to accept a few of their flaws to cheaply solve a problem that’s not something I’ll use every day.
Full disclosure, Wyze was actually my first choice for this problem. They sell a three pack of water sensors for $40, but for some insane reason force you to buy their whole security package in order to own the Wyze Sense Hub. I don’t need another security system, so with no other option I had to switch to Govee.
The Sensors
Having tested and owned smart moisture sensors in the past, I have some experience with these. Typically, the sensor unit will have a number of metal prongs on the bottom that detect when it is sitting in water. It will alert under this condition, and alert again when the water has dried up. The Govee water sensors add a metal plate on top that can also alert if something is dripping on top of the sensor. There is also a very loud 100 dB siren built in which will alarm whether your device is connected to the hub or not. Given the finicky nature of a lot of smart home devices, I fully appreciate the built in siren which is a great failsafe to include.
The Hub
Another…goddamn…hub. And what’s more, a single purpose hub! You can’t use this hub to convert any other devices to WiFi. Not even Govee’s own products. I was hopeful that I could use it to connect a Govee Bluetooth lightstrip someone had given me to my network, but no. The hub comes pre-connected to the sensors you purchased with the kit. You can add up to a total of 10 Govee water sensors to a single hub.
The hub itself is a small square block about the size of an AC power adapter. It plugs directly into the outlet with no cord or dongle, so this will partially block the other outlet or in a power strip it will make the adjacent outlets hard to use or inaccessible. It also has a blue light on the front to tell you its on. To date, I haven’t found a way to turn that light off. Hubs should not be seen or heard.
Another annoying drawback of the hub is that it only works on 2.4 GHz WiFi. In a world where blending SSIDs for 2.4 and 5 GHz WiFi is becoming more popular, or even the default setting on many routers, this makes setup a chore if not completely impossible. In my case, I had to disable my 5 GHz antenna (which screwed up my network something awful for a bit) just to get the hub to connect. Lucky for me it has stayed connected since I re-enabled the 5 GHz antenna, but I am searching for ways to make the router only allow this device to connect to 2.4 GHz and ignore any requests it makes to join the 5 GHz band.
The App and Setup
The Govee Home app is pretty easy to use. It offers the ability to add/remove/control devices, create automations, group devices by room, etc. Unlike many other smart home apps, Govee Home also functions as a blog, a sales platform, a community to share creations and themes, and a profile manager with a gamification system that I still don’t understand.
For setup purposes, you just need to know to look under the Home Improvement tab for the WiFi Smart Gateway (not the Water Sensor product that you bought) and then step through the setup. As mentioned before, if you’re going to hit a snag here, it will be with the 2.4 vs 5 GHz WiFi issue. Otherwise it’ll connect the hub in a minute and you’ll see all of your sensors in the home screen.
There is nothing you can really do with the sensor settings, and annoyingly the hub itself doesn’t show up as a device in your list (I was hoping this was where I could turn off the always on blue light). If you choose to build automations in the Govee app, this would be the time to do it. Otherwise you can either go on with your day knowing you’ve successfully set up your devices, or move on to where ever you choose to set up automations and connect your new water sensors!
Final Thoughts
When it comes to smart water sensors, your options are fairly limited. If you’re already married to a product line that offers them, you’d probably be best served buying the sensors in that product line, hoping they’ll support Thread and Matter at some point. If you’re more platform agnostic like me, Govee is a fine option. I’ll never need more than a handful of sensors, so a single (cringe) hub will support my needs.
There are plenty of flaws in this product, and some are very tough to overlook. The single function hub is just nonsense. In a world where companies like SwitchBot are packing thermometers, IR blasters, light sensors, LED displays and buttons into their hub, there’s no excuse for a silly single purpose hub except to save money. I’d be willing to spend $70 on an all purpose Govee hub and then buy the sensors separately instead.
The 2.4 GHz WiFi issue could be a deal breaker for a lot of people, even those that are tech savvy. I have a friend who uses only Apple products. He called me frantic one afternoon because none of the baby monitors he’d bought would work on his WiFi. When I figured out the issue with the blended SSID’s of his 2.4 and 5 GHz networks, the only solution we could come up with was for him to use really long extension cords to get the cameras out of the 5 GHz range so he could pair them to the 2.4 GHz network. I don’t want devices like these clogging up my 5 GHz bandwidth, but in 2023 they need to support both 2.4 and 5 GHz. Even budget companies like Govee can’t put the burden on the end user to figure that out.
For my purposes, these devices solve my use case for a total of about $35. Once I got around my gripes and technical issues, I’ll never think about them again unless they alarm. I’ve built some routines to add more alerts in the event of a leak. I’ll also sleep a bit more soundly knowing if the connection to them fails, they’ll still start shrieking until the batteries run out. It’s not the most elegant solution, but for the price and with the feature set, I’d recommend Govee Water Sensors.