Review on 🔌 Kasa Smart Plug Classic 15A, Wi-Fi Outlet for Smart Home with Alexa & Google Home Compatibility, No Hub Required, UL Certified, 2.4G WiFi Support Only, 1-Pack (HS105), White by Aaron Parish

This is the first smart plug device I've bought. We have a few timers around the house and an old automatic lighting system, but I wanted to control a few lights on the porch, and since there wasn't an electrical outlet, we looked for alternatives. First we tried one of these inexpensive wireless sockets. Everything worked fine for a while, but sometimes the remote control didn't respond. In other cases, the light turned on or off by itself. We started to wonder if the neighbor had the same type of switch and was interfering with our signals. Enter the TP-Link smart plug. This is ideal because it only closes one of the containers and we can keep using the other. We use multiple Revain Echo devices around the house so integration with Alexa was a must. I have several other TP-Link devices at home and am happy with them, so I decided to give it a try and was very happy. Setup was easy. I downloaded the Kasa app to my phone, followed the simple instructions and paired it with Alexa via the Echo app. and done. It took maybe three minutes to set up and everything worked perfectly the first time and every time since. You don't need batteries or other devices (hubs or other hardware), so all you need is a smart plug, a smartphone or tablet, and Wi-Fi. Even if you didn't have Wi-Fi, you could still control it from your smartphone, but you'd have to connect to Wi-Fi in the plug itself. Now we can just ask Alexa to turn the lights on or off, and the response time is almost instantaneous. I thought there might be a second or two delay when using Alexa, but there isn't. I can also use my phone to turn the lights on or off (or whatever device you have the app on) or I can set different timers or other scenes if I really want to. However, for our purposes, simply turning it on or off will suffice. Also, the device has a button on the side that allows you to turn the light on and off manually, but we hid the plug behind the cabinet, so we win. Do not use this function. It really is as simple as automatic lighting can be. I'm very happy and I end up seeing some hardwired switches being installed in different rooms to give us even more control over the lights and the ability to ask Alexa to turn off the downstairs lights as the kids aren't seems to ask work. almost as good. Based on my experience I will most likely keep coming back to TP-Link for our other smart devices as the app is very easy to use and combining multiple devices into one app allows for custom scenes and things like vacation mode etc (and I mean One small) downside that I can think of is that at the moment I don't think there is a way to dim the lights controlled by a switch. I understand that to a degree, as TP-Link has no idea what kind of devices people can connect to it, and they don't want people shutting down devices that might become corrupted as a result. However, there can be times when it would be nice if the lights were only half on, so keep in mind that as of today this is a strict on or off plug. They could change this in the future, maybe with a firmware update, but I don't expect that to happen. If you want to dim the lights, you'll likely need to invest in one of the wired switches that offer that feature.