Smart plugs are among the most useful smart home devices you can buy. You can use a smart plug to turn almost any electrical device into a smart device that can be turned on and off remotely. With the right automations, however, smart plugs can offer something even more valuable: peace of mind.
We always used to panic that we’d left something on
I honestly can’t count the number of times we’ve been an hour into a long journey when either my wife or I will suddenly panic because I’ll be convinced that I left the iron on and she’ll be convinced she left the curling iron on. The only options at this point used to be turning around and driving home again or living with the fear that our house had burned to the ground until we got back home.
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Like so many things that you do on a regular basis, you’re pretty sure that you remember turning off the iron, or any other device with the potential to destroy your home. You can’t be completely sure that you’re not just remembering one of the many other times that you turned it off, however, and the fear sets in.
A smart plug lets you turn off devices from anywhere
The simplest way to solve this problem is with 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 that you usually worry about to that smart plug. If you’re paranoid that you’ve left the device running, you can pull out your phone and turn the smart plug off, safe in the knowledge that you’re not going to set your bedroom alight.
Most modern smart plugs allow you to control them from outside your home. Wi-Fi smart plugs can be controlled remotely through the manufacturer’s cloud service. For Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Thread smart plugs, you’ll need to have a hub that’s connected to the internet in your home that can relay the 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 your home hub in order to control your smart plug away from home.
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If your smart plug has energy monitoring, you can also see whether the device you’re worried about is on or not. If the energy draw is minimal, the device probably isn’t running, and you don’t need to worry about powering off the smart plug. If the energy monitoring shows a significant power usage, however, then you were right to be worried: you did leave the iron on.
You should still always follow safety guidance for your devices and never rely solely on a smart plug for fire safety.
An automation can warn you that devices are still on
Using a smart plug to turn off devices when you’re away from home is useful, but it relies on you remembering that you might have left the iron on in the first place. If you completely forget about it, the device will keep running as you won’t manually turn it off from your phone. This is where automations really come into their own.
With smart home software such as Home Assistant, you can create an automation that will alert you when the energy draw on a smart plug has stayed above a set threshold for a fixed amount of time. For example, if the smart plug connected to your iron has been showing high power draw for more than 30 minutes, an automation can send a critical alert to your phone, warning you that the iron is still on.
The benefit of this automation is that it will work whether you’re at home or somewhere else. It’s just as easy to leave a device on accidentally when you’re at home as when you’re going out. The automation doesn’t care whether you’re home or not; it sends out its warning regardless.
With a basic automation, all you get is the notification. You then have to open the relevant app to turn your smart plug off. A smarter alternative in Home Assistant is to send an actionable notification with a button that will turn the smart plug off. You can then immediately turn off the device directly from the notification.
Get a notification if a device is still on when leaving the house
Getting a notification when a device has been on for more than 30 minutes is fine, but if you leave home with the iron still on, it has 30 minutes in which to set your house on fire. For peace of mind, it would be good to know if any devices are still on when you’re leaving the house.
That’s exactly what you can do. You can use geolocation to determine when everyone has left the house. For even greater accuracy, you can use a combination of indicators, such as the smart lock being locked, people being detected leaving the house on the video doorbell, and the Wi-Fi connection of your smartphone to determine when everyone has left the house. Using a Bayesian sensor can make these types of combinations of indicators impressively accurate.
Once it’s been determined that everyone has left the house, that condition can trigger an automation that checks if any smart plugs currently have a significant power draw. You can then get an immediate notification that you’ve left the iron on without having to wait for 30 minutes.
One of the things I love about Home Assistant is that if there is a problem you face in your home, you can often find a way to solve it using an automation. It took me just a few minutes to set up my smart plug automations, and now that they’re in place, we no longer ever have to worry about whether we’ve left dangerous devices running at home. Genuinely 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.
