Smart Home September – My Journey Into Home Automation (Part 4 of 4)
Switching things up…
So over the last couple of weeks we looked at a couple different solutions for controlling lights via Google Home Mini.
We’ve looked at two different solutions for making lights smarter previously, smart plugs, which control the power at the wall, and smart Bulbs, which control the power at the light source. These aren’t the only places you can control the flow of power, though–you can also control lights through a switch.
Advantages to the Switch…
Similar to the plugs, switches aren’t a consumable like a bulb, so (theoretically) you won’t have to replace them as frequently (again, with the length of time that the bulbs will allegedly last, it’s possible that the longevity might be about the same, but honestly? I’ve had supposedly 10 year bulbs go out within a year. I’ve looked at the math that they use to calculate the bulb longevity and sometimes it’s not realistic. *Bulb may last 10 years if only used 45 minutes a day two days a week, or it could last 20 years if only used for ten minutes on only the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Offer not valid in the state of California.)
Similar to the smart bulb I talked about last week, you can get smart dimmer switches, so you can make any light fixture dimmable with the right bulbs. and, if you wanted to make your great aunt Susan’s antique carousel floor lamp a smart lamp, you could use a switched outlet to control it using a smart switch.
What I’m using – The Wemo Smart Switch
That was a pretty long winded introduction to smart switches, but how did I wind up here? Well, like most of the other items it involved a bargain and an accident. I’d gone into Home Depot for… well… actually, to be honest I don’t remember what I went in for. Sometimes I wind up in Home Depot in some kind of trance, wandering the aisles aimlessly looking for nothing in particular until the siren song of something calls in such a way that I must answer. On the day in question, though, the siren that lured me in was a brown box with a green and white sleeve over it, with a bright white pairing of a smart switch and a smart plug, the WeMO WiFi Light Switch + Smart Plug Bundle. Originally, $69.99, clearance price, $29.50.
It made me stop because, I’d been looking for another smart plug (I was using the Geeni Outdoor Smart Plug in my shop to control some of the lighting and knew come Christmas I’d have to put it back), and I’d been kicking around the idea of a smart switch for our front porch. Shortly after we’d moved in I installed a programmable timer to control the porch lights because I realized if I forgot to turn the lights on before we left the house, when we got home it was pitch black in our driveway. The problem is, there’s not a typical on/off switch, there are four buttons hidden under a cover, and if you don’t press on the cover in exactly the right spot, instead of turning the light on or off, it would turn your program on or off, or flip the program so it was turning on the lights during the hours you wanted it on and off during the hours you wanted it on.
Given the fact that the plug I had been looking at was $25.00 by itself and this box included solutions to both of my problems, I decided to bite the bullet. I hadn’t tried any Wemo items yet, and figured at the price point I couldn’t pass it up. So I snagged my budget boxed set, waltzed up to the self check out and scanned it, pretty satisfied with my deal as it stood.
I scanned it, looked at the register, and my jaw dropped.
You see, the $60 switch and plug set, which I thought I was scoring at under $30, rang up at $13.00.
I cancelled the transaction, marched right back to the clearance end cap, and grabbed the other one off of the shelf. If there had been more than just the two, I probably would’ve walked out of there with all of them, but landing two of the sets and still coming in under what I originally thought I was going to pay was enough.
The best investment…
The Wemo switches were honestly the best investment I’ve made so far. I’d not used the Wemo products before, so I wasn’t completely sure what I was getting but I was willing to take the risk. Having done that, I would’ve gladly paid full price for the set based on what I got out of it.
The Wemo setup is similar in nature to the Geeni, or basically any other smart device I’ve had to set up–the process is very similar no matter what product you’re using, the apps and brands change but the basic idea stays the same. But what blew me away with the Wemo switches is the ability to program a long press of the switch. There’s a number of functions available for it, from turning an item (or item(s)) on, off, or even putting certain items into “vacation mode,” where the system will cycle the devices int he system at random to make it appear as though someone is home. But so far my favorite use for this is the “Toggle” function. Basically, the long press acts as an on-off switch for the devices that you link to the action.
The best explanation is how I set up my shop lighting–when I came home with two switches, I knew for sure that one of them was going to the porch, and I set that switch up to automatically turn the lights on starting at 15 minutes after dusk until midnight , then turn on again at 6:00 am and off 15 minutes after sunrise. But the second switch, I had no idea. I finally decided on shop lighting for it, and it was during that setup process that I realized the potential for the long press. You see, prior to this, the only way for me to turn on all of my shop lights at once was to say “Hey Google, turn on the shop lights,” and it would turn them on. That’s fine, and the entire reason that I wanted to put a Google Home out there, but using the long press and toggle, I set it up so that holding the switch for 2 seconds now controls the switched light bulb as well as the plug I installed to control the lights on the other side of the shop. It functions as if I’d wired the whole shop’s lighting to the switch, but in actuality I only connected them via wifi and programmed it in the mobile app.
My thoughts
Honestly, of the products I’ve used to this point, the Wemo products feel the most well-made. The Geeni products work fine, but they feel cheap to me. By comparison, the Wemo products feel much better made. My main gripe is with the size of the plugs–one of them is currently set up to control a pair of nightstand lamps in our bedroom, which are plugged into a 6 outlet surge protector on the wall. The problem is, the Wemo plugs block two extra outlets in the surge protector because of how they’re set up. Overall, though, it’s a minor flow that really only impacts this specific setup. It’s really a small price to pay for a plug that can also be linked to a switch with any combination of other Wemo devices using the long press function. I’d absolutely use more of these in my house.