So far I'm very impressed with Hydros. At present I have a Control-4 and Control-XS configured as a collective on a 215 peninsula, and a Control-X3 on a 38-Bowfront. I use several of their pH, temperature, leak and water level sensors, along with two WiFi Power Strips and several individual WiFi Smart Plugs. I have not yet gone down the Mastertronic path with Hydros.
Hydros is easy super easy to setup if you are connecting one of their named supported devices. There's plenty of generic functions that can be combined in ways to create pretty much whatever you want to do.
There's excellent documentation and available info for doing DIY cables and connections. But not that much documentation for all the programming features available. I think that has to do with how rapidly they've been expanding the flexibility and feature set.
Component build quality is superb, rugged and definitely has the look and feel of something that will last a very long time.
Since there's no code to write, if you have programming skills (as do I) and want to setup sophisticated functions, you'll have to play around with the predefined setups to understand the logic and stack them together to get what you want. That can be frustrating for someone who has become comfortable writing Apex code and just want X to make Z turn on if Y is also ON. But the ability is there once you spend some time learning Hydros.
Most recently I replaced all the mechanical float switches and associated wiring on my Trigger Systems Platinum Sump fleece system with a single Hydros Water Level Sensor, a couple connectors and some wire off
Amazon, along with one Generic Output defined in Hydros that uses a Hydros Drive Port to power the fleece motor. The new setup is more sophisticated and way more reliable, with protection against fleece/motor jams, programmable fleece consumption rate and more. Hydros brings a lot of two opposing worlds into one system, the
I Don't Want To Write Any Code For Anything and the
DIY Frustrated Engineers.
