We live in the era of “smart home” which gives the homeowners control over almost everything from providing better home security, saving time, electricity and changing home into an automated one.
The smart home devices turn our “dumb” home into a smart one by using the appropriate devices. Only a few devices in your home can be controlled by your phones or voice commands. But you can use one device which can help to make your home even smarter. A smart plug is an answer to that.
Smart plugs play a major role in automating dumb devices. It can make your smart home synchronized and hence improve life convenience. Almost any device which we plug into an outlet can be made smarter by connecting it into a Wi-Fi connected plug.
Smart plugs generally come with an app where we set account and preferences. Most of them work with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi connection without a hub. Thus making it easier to install and connect.
We can connect the plug with Google Home or Amazon Alexa by using the same account for voice commands. Voice command feature works very well for lamps or TVs.
Following are the best ways you can use smart plugs for your home:
Convenience
A smart plug can turn any of your home appliances into smart objects by connecting to it which can communicate further with other smart objects. Its very convenient to manage home appliances from a distance using an app in your phone.
By using the automation app you can schedule your kettle or coffee maker, turn on the TV, humidifier all from your office. You can also turn on or off the lights on automation. You can just view your app to see which appliances are on running mode and operate them as you need.
Safety
There is always a chance that we may forget to turn off our electric devices in a rush when we leave our home. In such cases its hard to go back to our home and switch off the items. Smart plugs come to great use in such conditions. Attachment of smart plugs to home devices ensures control of items from wherever you are just by using the app to shut it down.
Consider an example of space heaters, some of them are not so energy efficient. We can use smart plugs to schedule its timing. Not only scheduling but these plugs also help in energy conservation. Hence smart plug provides safety for users.
If you are living in a home where the electrical wiring is old we may have safety concerns about overheating socket and so on. In such cases, the smart plugs will not contribute to any chance for overheating.
There are some smart plug models which can even detect the socket temperatures and give alert to the user.
Security
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By using smart plugs we can turn on and off the lights from far away as we wish through its companion app. With the help of scheduling the lights, we can make our home look like it is occupied even we are not home.
Suppose you are spending your weekend holidays overseas and you want to create an illusion that you are at home. You can set up this illusion by using a smart plug and some lamps connected to it over the window to warn off intruders.
You can also set up the time schedule of lights at night from wherever you are and can stay at ease.
Manage Energy Use
The smart plug enables to create schedules for your home appliances about when to turn it on and off. This can help conserve energy from the devices which draw a lot of power when not in use.
Some smart plugs contain energy monitoring system which analyzes the power consumption of the device connected to it. So, we can know how much energy is consumed by certain devices with the duration of time period. Hence we can take proper energy management steps to save our money on power consumption and next electronic purchases.
Controlling Children’s Screen Time
Are you tired of getting your children to study? Children nowadays are obsessed with watching TVs, playing games on play station and so on. Its too hard to convince them to study and follow the time limited for this kind of activities.
Smart plugs can solve this problem. It can control the screening time for children by scheduling the time. For example, you can set a time limit on the TV for an hour and it will automatically turn off after that exact time. Proper after-school routine for children can be developed in this way.
Reduce Vampire Load
Many of you might not know that some of the electronics that we use in our home consume some amounts of energy when they are in standby mode. Annually, it cost $200 for an average home, that is 10% of your electricity bills. This effect is called “Vampire Load”.
A single product can consume little amount of vampire power. But, when many products are used, the standby power overall becomes more than what we would expect. Smart plug reduces the amount of vampire power.
Some of the greatest standby power consumers are desktop computers, heaters, ACs, Wi-Fi modems, scanners, printers, phone chargers, set-top boxes, and microwaves.
Reduce risk for fire
Electrical appliances can generate fires or cause an electric shock at any moment if proper safety measures are not taken. When the appliances are connected to the smart plug, proper turning OFF and ON of the devices can be maintained automatically. Many models of smart plugs have more safety features than the required standards. They have an automatic shut off features in case of overpowering.
Some of the smart plugs have monitoring features for socket temperature. Hence, we can automatically turn OFF the appliances to avoid the risk of fire hazards caused by electricity.
Smart plugs are a major part of home automation due to its independent functioning. Once you get to know about smart plugs you will discover how smarter can your home get and how to make our life easier than now.