Smart plug automations give me something that money can’t buy
Smart plugs are some of the most useful smart home devices you can buy. You can use a smart plug to turn almost any electrical appliance into a smart device that can be turned on and off remotely. However, with the right automations, smart plugs can offer something even more valuable: peace of mind.
We always panicked that we had forgotten something
I honestly can’t count the number of times we’ve been an hour into a long trip where my wife or I will suddenly panic because I’ll be convinced I left the iron on and she’ll be convinced she left the curling iron on. The only options at this point were to turn around and drive home or live with the fear that our house burned to the ground until we got home.
Like so many things you do regularly, you’re almost sure to remember turning off the iron or any other appliance that could destroy your home. However, you can’t be completely sure that you don’t remember one of the many other times you turned it off, and fear sets in.
A smart plug lets you turn off devices from anywhere
The easiest way to solve this problem is to use a smart plug. As long as your smart plug can be controlled from outside your home, all you need to do is connect the device you usually worry about to that smart plug. If you’re paranoid that you left the device on, you can take out your phone and turn off the smart plug, knowing that you’re not going to light up your room.
Most modern smart plugs allow you to control them from outside your home. Wi-Fi smart plugs can be controlled remotely via the manufacturer’s cloud service. For Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Thread smart plugs, you’ll need an internet-connected hub in your home that can relay commands to your smart plug. The same is true if you use Apple Home; You’ll need a HomePod or Apple TV set up as a home hub in order to control your smart plug away from home.
If your smart plug has energy monitoring, you can also see whether the device you’re worried about is on or not. If the power consumption is minimal, the device is probably not working and you don’t need to worry about turning off the smart plug. However, if the energy check reveals significant energy consumption, you are right to worry: you have indeed left the iron on.
You should always follow safety guidelines for your devices and never rely solely on a smart plug for fire safety.
An automation can warn you that the devices are still on
Using a smart plug to turn off devices when you’re not home is useful, but it requires you to remember that you may have left the iron on in the first place. If you forget it completely, the device will continue to work because you won’t manually turn it off from your phone. This is where automations come into their own.
With smart home software like Home Assistant, you can create automation that will alert you when a smart plug’s energy consumption remains above a set threshold for a set amount of time. For example, if the smart plug connected to your iron has been showing high energy consumption for more than 30 minutes, an automation can send a critical alert to your phone, warning you that the iron is still on.
The advantage of this automation is that it will work whether you are at home or elsewhere. It’s just as easy to accidentally leave a device on when you’re at home as it is when you go out. Automation doesn’t care whether you’re home or not; he sends his warning regardless.
With basic automation, all you get is the notification. You then need to open the corresponding app to turn off your smart plug. A smarter alternative in Home Assistant is to send an actionable notification with a button that will turn off the smart plug. You can then immediately turn off the device directly from the notification.
Get notified if a device is still on when you leave the house
Getting a notification when an appliance has been on for more than 30 minutes is great, but if you leave the house with the iron still on, you have 30 minutes to set your house on fire. For peace of mind, it would be good to know if any appliances are still on when you leave the house.
This is exactly what you can do. You can use geolocation to determine when everyone has left the house. For even more precision, you can use a combination of indicators, such as smart lock locking, detected people leaving the house on the video doorbell, and your smartphone’s Wi-Fi connection to determine when everyone has left the house. Using a Bayesian sensor can make these types of indicator combinations impressively accurate.
Once it has been determined that everyone has left the house, this condition can trigger automation that checks to see if any smart plugs are currently consuming a lot of power. You can then receive an immediate notification that you left the iron on without having to wait 30 minutes.
One of the things I like about Home Assistant is that if you have a problem in your home, you can often find a way to solve it using automation. It only took me a few minutes to set up my smart plug automations, and now that they’re in place, we no longer have to worry about whether we left dangerous devices running at home. Truly beneficial automations like this are one of the ways I’ve been able to get my family to put up with my constant smart home tinkering.
