hey everybody its lines I’ve been and we’re taking a look today at the wise plugs these are a pair of smart plugs that sell for just about 20 bucks for a pair of two and they connect to the internet and allow you to turn lights on and off or other devices plugged into them remotely via an app and of course you have some automation both through their app along with the Amazon a word in Google home we’re going to explore what you can do with these inexpensive smart switches here in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that why sent us these plugs free of charge however all of the opinions are about two here are my own nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get to it now and see what these plugs are all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware again these are about 20 bucks for the set of two you can fit two of them together on a single wall outlet if you want they’re thin enough for that they connect directly to your Wi-Fi and don’t require any other wise products to work my only gripe with the setup process was that I had to connect my phone to each plug to get it configured so it will take a little bit of time if you’ve got a bunch of these to configure because it won’t get the Wi-Fi data over Bluetooth like some other products do so there’s a little bit of an extra step in getting them set up but once you’re off and running you are ready to go with these they do though require that you use the wise app and you’ll have to set up an account with wise if you want to use them with the Amazon echo or with Google homes would just be prepared for that but that’s usually the case with most of these devices here not much to it otherwise here there is a button on the side that you can use to manually
switch the switch on and off on the back here you’ll note that it only supports 120 volts at least for this US version that’s no surprise of course so if you are traveling these will not work in areas where you’re running with a 240 volt outlet and as you can also see here it’ll take a maximum of 15 amps at 128 volts for the device that is plugged into it and I found that they don’t require all that much power to operate when they’re sitting idle us a little bit earlier I plugged in a kilowatt and when it’s just sitting there waiting for something to happen it’s consuming about 0.3 to 0.4 watts and then of course it will consume more as you turn it on and the device that’s attached to it begins consuming electricity so it won’t add all that much to your electric bill as these are sitting idle so let’s jump into the Y’s app now and you can see that we’ve got a bunch of wise stuff configured on it already but we want to be focusing on the studio plug and right now it is off and if I go here and just tap on you can see that it will turn itself on pretty quickly here there’s not much latency between the time you push the button down and when things turn on likewise I can also hit the switch here on the side to turn it on and off although I’m finding the app doesn’t update itself when you do that so if you refresh the app it’ll get a new status indicator as to what the plug is doing right now I can also tap into the studio plug to get a little bit more options available to me so I can also switch it on this way if I want to do that we have a timer here that I can set so that the plug will turn on and off at certain times of the day pretty simple to get that going they
also have a vacation mode which I think is kind of cool so what it will do is turn the plug on and off at random times so you don’t get any control over when it does turn itself on but it will look like your home because it will just pick random times to activate and deactivate the plug you also get a report on runtime here that you can see at the bottom of the screen and you’ll get that on a 7-day average as well as just the day that you’re looking at it but it doesn’t measure power consumption that would have been a nice little add-on to this but at the price point you can’t get a lot of the features you’ll get on more expensive devices but there are a lot of things you can do to integrate this into automation so let’s take a look at some things you can do with this plug now if you look at the top of the screen you’re going to see an option for edit rules and I’m going to click on that real quick and what you can see here is that I’ve got one already configured called cookie jar opens it might be a little bit hard to see on screen here given the color choices they made with the app I’m going to tap into that real quick just so you can get a better sense of that now what the cookie jar is is a sensor that we looked at a few months ago here on the channel that Weis also manufactures now these are contact sensors so when the top portion of the sensor breaks contact with the lower portion a signal is sent and we can trigger something to happen as a result that’s what we did here with the cookie jar thing is when I separate the sensor here will trigger the plug to
turn itself on and what I’m gonna do now is trigger something to have it turn itself off when the two pieces reconnect so let’s boot the app up here and take a look at that so we’re gonna go back to the rules screen here and hit the plus icon and when we’re in there we’re going to go to device trigger and we’re going to add a device trigger and we’re going to go over to our cookie jar at the bottom and we’re going to add an option for when the cookie jar closes and you can see we also have the ability to have it do something after a certain length of time with it being opened and closed but this one we’re going to keep simple here so we’re going to click Save and then we’re going to add an action we’re going to go to studio plug here and what we’re going to do is have it turn off when we put that sensor back together we’re going to click Save and we’re going to click on done here and let’s that went out of it too quickly and now we’ll see hopefully another trigger added to the mix here and there we go we’ve got two now so let’s jump back to our camera we’ve got our sensor here we’re going to put the two portions back together again and when we do that as you can see here it now turns the lights off and if I separate it it’ll turn on and put it back together again and it turns off and of course I’m getting notifications from the app on my watch right now as well so that is a way you can
integrate this with other wise products and you could also have it for example react to a motion event from one of their cameras or react when maybe a light bulb turns on you have a lot of different things that you can set up inside of the rules here to automate things just through the wise application so let’s take a look now at how this integrates with other devices we’re going to use the Amazon a word to demonstrate this but you can also use Google home and what we’re going to do in the lower right-hand portion of the smartphone screen is tap on devices and I previously set up a group called basement and right now in the basement I have a light bulb from another manufacturer already configured with my Amazon a word here and what I want to do is add more lights to the mix I’m going to click on edit and then I’m going to scroll through the list of things that I have available to me and you can see the smart plug called studio plug is showing up here and the reason why it’s showing up is that I previously paired the wise app skill with my Amazon a word account and it will automatically bring in any device that you connect to the wise app to Amazon which is very convenient here so we’re going to make sure that’s checked off we’re going to click on save and that will add a new device to
the mix now what we’re going to do here is cut over to my second camera we’re going to not have the a word be audible on the video so we don’t set off your devices and I’m going to ask it to first turn on the smart plug so turn on the studio plug and there you go you can see the Christmas lights turned on here and then of course I can tap on my screen here and turn them back off again there is a little bit of a delay here with the Amazon devices versus the wise app but not much now because we set these two devices together in a group we can control them as a group even though they are from two different manufacturers so I can say to the device here turn on the basement and there you go we got both the plug turning on and the lamp and you got to be careful here because if you had a heater attached and you said turn on the basement that would turn on the heater as well so you need to be careful about what you do with these plugs and what groups you put them into but if you are controlling perhaps a smart bulb and a dumb strip of lights you can control them together like this now you’re going to see a dimmer command here but that is only for the bulb the plugs here do not support dimming but I can though turn everything both off here with a button push or another voice command now it also supports IFTTT or if this then that I’ve got their app loaded up right now but they also have a
web version of this and what’s nice about ifttt is that it’s kind of like the connective tissue of all these different devices so if you’ve got something that doesn’t support the Amazon a word or the Google home thing you can usually connect it up through IFTTT and wise supports a lot of different things on the platform from all the different devices that they make but you’ll see here at the bottom that we can have avenged trigger based on when the plug turns on or off and if you go over here to create trigger and then go over to that you can see all the different things that you can connect that action with so you can even do something like running it without any devices attached to it at all and maybe just using it as a trigger for IFTTT for example to maybe turn on something else in the house you can really get kind of crazy with this once you start digging into all the different things that you could do with it I’ve got mine right now just keeping a log in a spreadsheet every time it turns on or off here and it gives you the time in which that event occurred but you can really start digging into it and finding all sorts of different things that you can do when you attach this up to IFTTT now one thing to note here is that you are not locked into any one of these platforms they can all work together at the same time so you could have the wise app doing something the IFTTT doing something else Amazon and Google could also be doing something independently but know that
it’s possible you could get yourself into a loop where maybe one service is turning the light on and another one is immediately turning it off so you do need to keep track of what you’re programming on all of these different services because there’s no one place to track all of your automation so just be prepared for that you can’t break anything but if it starts acting weird it’s perhaps a collision between two different things you set up on two different platforms but overall I’m quite pleased with this for the price point I think it’s very affordable it’s very simple all it does is turn things on or off but when you roll in the automation it becomes a lot more powerful I would have liked to have seen some power consumption data that would have been a nice little add-on and I’d also like to see a simpler set up process but once you get it up and running it works as advertised and I think the price is very reasonable for what you’re getting here so another neat little product from wise let me know what you thought down in the comments below I’ve got a playlist where you can see how those sensors work and how the cameras work down in the video description if you want to get up sense as to how the whole family works together here and until next time this is line siphon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold-level supporters the four guys with quarters podcast Chris Allegretto Tom Albrecht Mike Talbert Brian Parker in Caly an Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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