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Hyve Smart Package Locker Review: Protecting Your Holiday Deliveries
The onslaught of tech gear being delivered for WIRED Reviews, combined with the samples I receive constantly for my side hustle at Drinkhacker, means that delivery trucks are a constant occurrence on my suburban street. UPS and FedEx both make drops at my house nearly every day, and that’s not to mention occasional deliveries from the likes of DHL and, of course, Amazon and its ilk. But it’s usually not a problem. I work from home, so picking up packages left on the doorstep is just part of the scenery.
What is a problem is that I can’t be home 24 hours a day, and even though I have a very kind neighbor across the way who keeps an eye out for boxes on my front steps when I’m traveling, he isn’t always at home either. Package hold requests aren’t consistently honored by either of the major carriers—and earlier this year, FedEx seemingly discontinued its vacation hold option without bothering to tell anyone, the modern epidemic of porch piracy be damned. (A rep has since confirmed this with me, though no formal announcement has ever been made.)
Having packages held at shipping centers or access points usually costs money, typically about $5 per package and often more depending on the length of the hold, and that involves a trip after I get home to collect what’s arrived. If I’m gone for a week, that can mean fetching a dozen boxes or more.
All of that is a time-consuming pain, for which a startup called Hyve has come along to offer an assuagement: A smart lockbox that lets delivery drivers drop off packages in a secure location, notifying the homeowner whenever it’s been accessed. While the growing pains were significant, after weeks of testing, I found it a useful device that—just maybe—may earn a permanent home on my front porch.
Parcel lockboxes aren’t exactly a new concept. They operate basically like a standard post office mailbox, with a cantilevered hatch up top that allows deliveries to drop into a secure storage area below, where they can only be accessed through a keyed door. Delivery folks can put packages in through the hatch, but only you can get them out.
The Hyve Smart Package Locker is a play on this idea, forgoing the two-chamber design in favor of an electronic hatch accessed via 4-digit PINs. The box itself measures 32 inches high, 20 inches wide, and 20 inches deep, with interior dimensions about 4 inches shorter in each direction. That makes for a total of 7.4 cubic feet, which Hyve says will fit 80 percent of Amazon package sizes (though obviously this depends on the specifics of your ordering habits). For me, that math worked out: Deliveries of three-pack bottles of wine fit fine, but anything larger was typically left out by the courier.
It’s built from a combination of plastic and steel, and while the side panels seem a little flimsy, there’s enough reinforcement behind them that I never worried that the unit would be easily damaged by a would-be package thief without power tools. Units are available in gray or white; I requested the latter to match my home’s color, but alas received a gray one.
Assembly is required—and be warned, it’s no cakewalk. The locker comes packed flat, notably with no printed instructions on how to put all the pieces together. A QR code in the box takes you to a web page featuring a walkthrough video and a PDF guide, which are my two least favorite ways to be guided through an installation process on a cell phone. The PDF is very difficult to read on a small screen, and this contributed to making what was already a cumbersome construction process even more difficult. I consider myself quite handy, but I ultimately spent nearly an hour putting the locker together due to a couple of easy-to-overlook goofs. Real, printed instructions—especially considering they’re all of five pages long—would go a long way toward streamlining the process. Or, better yet, why not just ship the thing preassembled?
A security bracket and cable tether are included so you can attach the Hyve to