Smart plugs allow you to intelligently turn your household appliances on and off, either via a schedule, as part of home automations/routines, on the app, or with your voice (through a smart speaker). They are a great way of automating household tasks, and can be used for anything from saving energy to making a fresh pot of coffee each morning.
When I first seen the Philips Hue Smart Plug, I thought “Why’s it 3-4x more expensive than other smart plugs”? I then wondered whether the fact that it’s controllable via Zigbee and Bluetooth offers any major benefit that justifies its price increase? After going out and buying this Hue Smart Plug, I wanted to write … Read more
I was recently playing around with a smart plug, and I didn’t have an Echo device – or my smartphone – nearby. I therefore started wondering whether it was possible to control the smart plug with a physical remote. As it turns out, there’s quite a few options open to you – but funnily enough, … Read more
Smart plugs are an interesting item in the world of smart home devices. They have the potential to become extremely useful, but there are some major questions that need to be answered before you can plug a smart plug into every socket in your home. Smart plug technology is facing off against one of the … Read more
Smart plugs are great (or so the marketing says…) – they can easily be used to turn household devices and appliances on/off via your voice, a phone app, automated schedules, and more. Awesome. Unless, of course, you want to control a device which has an electric or mechanical switch – like the red switch below: … Read more
Smart plugs are pretty useful devices – allowing you to easily control your appliances with a phone app, preset timers, and even your voice. But it’s not always practical to take your phone out every time you want to control it. Alternatively you can use a smart speaker, but remembering the correct voice command to … Read more
When talking about the benefits of smart plugs, I usually give the example of being able to turn your slow cooker on from work, so that you come home to a perfect meal. This relies on a key benefit of smart plugs: being able to turn them on and off whilst you’re away from your … Read more
Amazon regularly do bundle offers on smart devices, such as smart plugs with an Echo or Echo Dot. But why are they often included as a bundle – can you effectively use smart plugs with an Amazon Echo? Whilst you probably won’t want to plug your Echo into a smart plug (unless you have privacy … Read more
When you plug a device into a smart plug, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the device itself isn’t suddenly smart. And by that I mean that it’s still the same old device, merely plugged into a smart plug which can turn it on or off. A standard light – even one which supports dimming … Read more
Smart plugs are plugged into your wall sockets, and then you plug devices into them. The smart plug’s power can then be controlled with your smartphone app (or Amazon Echo/Google Home), meaning that you can turn the plugged-in device on/off with ease. But these smart plugs typically control just a single device, and often don’t … Read more