WIFI Smart Plug

 

I think every smart home enthusiast has dreams of a home where every light, appliance or fixture is somehow connected to the internet and can be turned on or off with the swipe of a finger on a smart phone or a wake word on a digital assistant.  The reality is, for most of us, it is still way too expensive to retrofit our homes with all of the tech.  The other issue is this technology is in its infancy so 5 years from now there will be new and better products so too big of an investment early may not be too smart.

There are ways to accomplish this dream.  We have smart bulbs, but at $10 a bulb minimum it can still get pretty pricey to outfit a whole house.  I have at least 120 light bulbs in my home not including outside lights and can lights.  By replacing all of them I would not gain any cost savings and the convenience gain is not worth the money for me.   The next logical step would be smart plug.  These smart outlets plug into your wall outlet and can be controlled by an app, a timer or a digital assistant.  You could also plug a power strip into the smart plug and control a group of appliances.  But again, to outfit a whole house with these to me is not cost effective given the price of around $20 per plug.

I have always been intrigued by these smart plugs but never had an obvious use case for just one of them so I held off on purchasing any.  Then my electric utility had one of their promotions where I could purchase 10 60 watt equivalent LED bulbs and get a free Linksio Smart Plug.  So I pulled the trigger.  I have never heard of the company Linksio and they don't even sell their products on Amazon but the product seems to be identical to many of the smart plugs from WEMO, Amazon and other manufacturers, and the price was right.  Most of these smart plugs work with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and IFTTT.

After setting up my smart plug I was able to synch it with Alexa so I can ask her to turn on/off the plug which was pretty cool but I was still at a loss of where to use the plug.  I plugged my home entertainment center power strip into it thinking I would use the smart switch to turn off all of my electronics components and save some money on the phantom power usage but soon realized that my cable box has a five minute power on boot so that wouldn't work for my family.   So my smart plug stayed on until the holidays when I finally had a use case.  My Christmas tree, in order to turn off the lights I need to bend down and crawl under the tree to unplug it.  Now all I have to say is Alexa, turn on/off the Christmas tree.   Is that worth $20?  Maybe, for the cool factor and impressing friends.

The one other useful feature that many of these smart plugs offer is energy monitoring.   So whatever is plugged into the smart outlet can be monitored and you can see how many watts it is using in real time and by month and year. So I can see my Christmas tree lights are using 19.8 watts and my home entertainment components were using over 100 watts.  I probably won't be purchasing any more smart plugs anytime soon but it will be useful around the holidays and if I ever need to determine how much electricity an appliance is using I am set.