I know some of you may find this a bit of a shock but I think I got a bit carried away with the smart home thing. For a while there you could only really turn on any lights, or use any of the several kitchen appliances, by shouting at another appliance to turn the ****ing thing on. I could often be heard arguing with my kitchen when all I wanted was a bacon sandwich.
The idea is THE dream though, isn’t it? So Back to the Future – ‘Turn on the Lights!’.
Anyway, while I can still control most things in my house by voice, I rarely do. One thing that has survived the smart home cull however are the smart plugs.
There’s a few reasons for that:
-> I use a lot of power. My home labs cost a bit to run, so I try now to turn off what I can when it’s not in use.
-> I want to know what power I use. I need to expense some.
So I have ended up with two types of smart plugs – there’s the original ones that I bought which were single plugs that either could control one device, or of course could connect to an extension lead. The ones I used were the Meross MSS310 units. These have proven very reliable with a decent app. I can of course turn them on/off by voice – ‘Turn off the TV’ for example – and I do still do that sometimes. You can also setup routines so ‘Leaving the house’ turns off everything you’d not want on when you’re not there for example. That hasn’t had a lot of use, as I just don’t go anywhere.
More importantly however the power tracking from these has proven really insightful and useful. The following for example shows the current power draw (1) of my core lab, and its power-usage for last month(2), and the cost for last month (3). Yes, the cost. I can tell it the cost per KwH and it works it all out for you.
I’ve found this really useful. Can you see the trap coming yet?!
Knowing the power consumption of things has helped me knock about a third off of my power bill. That’s mad. There’s also environmental benefits to that too of course. I just no longer leave things running. My backup NAS only backs stuff up at night for example, there was absolutely no reason for it to be on for the other 22 hours of the day. The power analysis helped me work out that stuff.
This has however led me on to wanting to understand more. (The trap, it’s coming). So I looked into and invested into smart power strips. These are similar devices but essentially each plug on the power strip is its own smart plug. The ones I opted for were the TP-Link TAPO P304M. They cost me about 25 quid on Amazon, and are very easy to setup.
What these give you is the ability to setup collections of devices, and of course to setup automations. My real power users are my ‘core’ – which is my lab/storage etc. – and my desk. So I have fully configured both with these power strips. The app you can see all of the plugs – I.e., all of them, everywhere, or by collection – in my example, by ‘Desk Stuff’ or ‘Core’.
Now I can both control each individual plug on those strips each by having an automation process, or individually. So for example I have ‘Full Desk Off’ that turns off absolutely everything on my desk, and just a normal ‘Desk Off’ that turns off everything while leaving my charging ports for phones etc. all live.
You also get a significant amount of power information for each plug on each and every strip. Oh my word, my advice is you need to be careful with this. If you’re not careful there will be SPREADSHEETS. This for example is the power consumption of my Mac mini M4 Server – this is on 24×7 and runs my Plex, and some other automation processes.
As a quick sidenote, those M4 Minis are fab low power units for Plex and general automation type stuff. Mine is only the base model 256GB/16GB unit, however it handles everything I’ve thrown at it, including a couple of VMs, just fine – while absolutely sipping on power:
It’s usually lower than 15w – the above is when it’s busy! I also run it in low-power mode too as I rarely need its full performance. I mean the toughest thing I ask it to do is some video conversions and for those I don’t really care if it takes 2 hours or 5.
The Trap
The trap with this stuff is that you can, if you’re not careful, become slightly obsessive about power monitoring! Like I say, I have full costs now on my always-on stack etc.
Summary
I’m really happy with both the Meross plugs and the TP-Link power strips. They both seem to be fairly accurate on the power calculations – I’ve plugged one into the other to compare – and they’re within 2-3% of each other. I like the apps. The Meross app is arguably slightly nicer to look at and simpler to view, but it’s not a huge gap. Would I prefer them to be the same app…? Of course. I made the mistake however of having a power strip given to me to play with….so then ended up investing in the TP-Link ones myself, hence the two apps. It’s not a problem though, as I tend to use them for different things.
The Meross single plugs I use for measuring and controlling collections of devices, whereas the TP-Link ones I’m interested in measuring and controlling individual items. It works brilliantly for this purpose.
Like I say, I’ve stepped back a little from fully voice-automating stuff. The lights thing and controlling the kitchen were particularly challenging on that front – but both apps fully integrate to most voice services such as Alexa etc. so you can do that if you want.
Most of the automations I use are on my phone and from the Tapo app, and they work really well.
Now all I need to do is ween myself off obsessing about the numbers. I like numbers, they’re pretty!
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