Cons: didn't work - either too sensitive or not sensitive enough
The Bottom Line: What sounded like a perfect solution to our pool alarm needs never worked despite two different units. Warranty only allowed for replacement.
AliventiAsylum's Full Review: Smartpool Pooleye Alarm
When we purchased our pool in the spring of 2004, one of the things I was insistent on was having a pool alarm. There were just too many horror stories about kids drowning when a parent’s back was turned for a moment or two. We already had the steps to our deck that they could be raised and locked, as well as the 6-foot self-locking fence around our yard required by law, but an alarm would give me a greater peace of mind.
When we were in the pool store, we came across the Smartpool PoolEye Alarm. It looked like the perfect solution to the issue. The main unit with the sensor gets mounted on the pool wall and the sensor portion goes down into the water where it monitors for any sub-surface water displacement. The idea is that this eliminates false alarms due to wind, rain, etc. The controller is a separate unit which you can keep in the house and serve as a remote alarm, assuring that you will hear it - at 120 decibels it would be hard to miss hearing.
This all sounded great to us, so we brought it home and installed it once our pool was set up. Where it is installed is important, especially when dealing with a round pool, so we chose the location carefully so that it followed the manufacturer’s directions. The installation was easy as the sensor unit attached right to the pool rim with a few screws. The Smartpool PoolEye Alarm is battery-operated, so we loaded in the batteries and waited to see if it worked.
The first issue we came across was that the remote control portion of the Smartpool PoolEye Alarm had to be in eye-line with the detector part of the alarm mounted on the pool. It should work fine within 100 feet of the sensor unit, though. We decided the best place would be the kitchen window when inside. When we were going to go in the pool, it would be easy to take it outside and turn the alarm off from here.
Next came adjusting the sensitivity. We struggled with this over several days before we finally decided we must have gotten a defective Smartpool PoolEye Alarm and brought it back to the pool store. They replaced it and we installed a second one just as easily as the first one. We still had the same problem.
No matter how much we adjusted, we could not seem to find the fine line between sensitive enough to detect a child falling in the pool and going off at the slightest ripple in the water or for no reason at all. Adjusting it was a matter of simply turning a screw, but no matter how much or how little we turned it, the Smartpool PoolEye Alarm seemed to fall to either one of these two extremes. This happened with both of the units we had. One time we thought we had it and then I jumped in the pool without turning off the alarm and it didn’t go off. Believe me, I weigh a lot more than the 15 pounds Smartpool advertises it will detect.
It wasn’t that the remote wasn’t picking it up. The sensor part of the Smartpool PoolEye Alarm has an alarm in it as well and this didn’t go off at all.
We followed the troubleshooting tips in the manual - yes, the batteries was fine. We checked the connections and they were all plugged in as they should be. We adjusted the sensitivity until I thought we were going to lose it from frustration.
By now, the pool store wouldn’t take the Smartpool PoolEye Alarm back, so we contacted the company. They were nice enough to offer to replace the unit once again, but at this point that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted my money back. There is a six-month warranty on the Smartpool PoolEye Alarm and we chose to take a major loss on this rather than keep fooling with units I did not believe would work. We did try adjusting it several other times throughout the season as well as moving it to different locations around our pool, nothing helped.
The idea behind the Smartpool PoolEye Alarm is a good one, but it never worked as it should for us. I wish I could recommend it but I don’t. If we were staying in this house, I might have tried a different alarm. As it is, we’ve done without and just been diligent about knowing where the kids are.
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