How do you smart/wifi plugs?

Lamps, battery chargers, christmas. Humidifier(turn off during day). With appliances, if they don't have mechanical switches, all you can do is pretty much turn off because they won't start without pressing a button.

They are great for lamps if you have Google/Alexa voice control.

apparently lamps is the primary use

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One of my smart outlets is specifically for the wife's flat iron and I have it set to turn off every day at 8 just in case she leaves it on when leaving for work.

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that is very smart, but i couldn't do that to the gf

yet

maybe when we get married

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apparently lamps is the primary use

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i have 4

one in the living room that i plug lamps and the christmas tree into in december.

one behind the heavy-arse credenza in the dining room that turns the 2 table lamps on in the afternoon without having to chase the cords each time to find the clickers on them.

one on my 'cornelias coke cooler' that turns it off every night and back on in the AM to save on electricity.

one on my smart hub so if it hangs up i can reset it remotely.

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You need to figure out how to automatically detect when it is hung and trigger the plug to reset.

Or replace the hub with a Pi.

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its difficult to figure out. only realize its not working correctly when i open the app and see the zwave devices are offline.

i guess i could do that in IFTTT maybe. have it check for one of my more reliable zwave devices and if its offline, do a reset.

the question is how do i flip the smartplug back ON? some kind of timeout that if the plug is off for more than 30 seconds, attempt to turn it on?

I think I’ll use the one I got for Christmas to turn on my espresso machine everyone morning before I go downstairs to heat it up for use.

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I use Wink and set 'robots' to control certain things in my house. In this case you could set a robot to turn off the switch 30 or so minutes after it was turned on...

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But if the receptacle isn't smart enough to tell the controller 1) that something has started pulling current, and 2) what device/appliance is plugged into it, then she would have to switch the outlet on every time or start a timer in some other way.


The idea is that every outlet in the house should (eventually) be smart enough to identify whatever device or appliance is plugged into it, and control itself according to rules you've set.

There are whole home energy monitors that can (supposedly) identify when specific appliances are running based on their electric "signature" (basically a waveform of the current draw). There is some training involved, then it uses machine learning to identify them in the future. Supposedly it sends the data to the mothership so that there will be less training in the future, but I'm really not sure how well these systems work. The ones I've seen (Sense, Neurio) mount in the electric panel and they monitor the mains, and maybe some allow more transformers to monitor individual circuits.

What I'm talking about is doing the same thing at the receptacle level. Not only would the current measurements be less noisy and more precise, but with the smarts in the receptacle it can control itself. If all of your outlets are smart, you can take the flat iron to any room and the outlet will start its own timer. Or maybe you have a small space heater that you move around, so you have a different set of rules for that.

I have either a plug or a switch on every light that our kids can turn on and have them on several routines to make sure they get turned off at appropriate times of the day.