Review on Grohe 22503LN0 Sense Guard Controller by Jason Mitts

We have a country house where a pipe froze last winter. Luckily a pipe broke near our house but it still caused quite a mess until one of my neighbors noticed and contacted us. I'm afraid if the frozen pipe was in the room it would work for a very long time and cause significant damage. To protect against such problems, we installed a Grohe water regulator this year. It's definitely bigger than it looks in the picture, but fitting it into our plumbing line wasn't a problem. We don't have plumbing, so there is no water meter in our house - we use a fountain instead and installed it exactly where the pipe from the fountain feeds the room. I hired a plumber to do the installation - he took less than an hour and had no problems at all with him. There's an optional mounting bracket (I wouldn't say it doesn't have to be optional) as well as a power port extension cable that you might find useful. In my case it was easy enough to install without those options, but of course a lot depends on where you need to place it. I was a bit worried about getting a strong enough WiFi signal for the device to work properly. That's why I also installed a powerline network extender, which gives me strong WiFi right next to the Grohe device. So far I haven't had any connection issues and can check the status or activate my Grohe device wherever I am. I have an extensive home automation system (Homeseer) in my country house and wanted to make sure the Grohe device could integrate with it. It didn't offer built-in integration, but the folks at Grohe were kind enough to post technical details about the device and I was able to hook it up with no issues. In operation, the Grohe performs impeccably, although we haven't had a major weather event to put its use to the test. With the Grohe app I can see the status of the device anywhere and turn the water on or off remotely. My home automation system also allows me to activate the device, so almost any event my home automation system detects can be used to start or shut off the water. For example, my system monitors the weather, and if it gets unusually hot or dry, it can turn on the water supply, turn on our sprinklers, and then turn everything back off and no one will be in the house. And of course, it's good to know that if a pipe bursts or leaks, Grohe will step in and make sure these problems remain minor disasters rather than major ones. Grohe's water regulator may appeal to many, especially if you're not always at home. For the price I think this is an amazing upgrade and makes our vacation home safer overall.