My wife finds the smartplug bricks to be unsightly and I concur. But on the positive side, if one dies, it’s super easy to replace. I’d love to just replace my outlets with smart outlets - or stick a Shelly relay or Sonoff Mini in the wall behind the outlet - but I’d really want to make sure they’re solid so I won’t have to replace them. I also want to make sure I’ll have local control. (Not sure if the smart outlets can be flashed with other firmware.) Anyone have much experience with these? Preferably long-term experience so you can speak to reliability?
Not super longterm experience… but I installed my first Shelly 1PM for a dumb coffee maker 3 months ago and have been pleased with setup, operation and power monitoring. 3 weeks ago I installed 5 of the Shelly US wall sockets, I have them running in parallel with some zigbee power monitoring wall sockets. Goal is to migrate away from the zigbee units as I move my HA server to new platform. I am also pleased with the install, op and power monitoring of the Shelly US wall sockets. I am running the power monitoring in parallel with the zigbee power monitoring and finding same reading from both over time periods and instantaneous reading. And these both match a dedicated power monitor for accuracy testing. I used the Shelly’s in local mode to a MQTT server and do not allow them to go to shelly cloud. So I can not speak to ShellyCloud functions. Also I do not use the new HA native integration. MQTT has been solid, I use it with both HA and Homebridge for Homekit.
Price point is pretty good for the Shelly units. And the company seems pretty interested their customers.
On the power monitoring, the only item the Shelly’s lack that the CentraLight Zigbee units have is voltage monitoring, just current. I have another device monitor voltage fluctuation, so this is not an issue for my use case. I understand you can easily move to Tasmoto and ESPHome on these Shelly units. And those platforms expose the voltage.
Good hunting!
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I am currently testing 4 shelly smart outlets, 4 shelly 1PMs, and 2 more relays.
There is some iffyness going on with the outlets not responding to commands, not sure if their connection is dropping, and also one of the outlets is turning off in the middle of the night with no explanation.
The 1 relay i am testing right now is inside the base of a freezer, not behind the outlet, and its connection to wifi is not great, but it has not caused any issues so far, it is for power and temp monitoring not power control, another will go in the main fridge for the same purpose
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I’m kinda leaning toward mothballing all my smartplugs and just putting Sonoff Minis behind all the outlets. (At less than $6 each on AliExpress, they’re way cheaper than the Shellys.) I like that I can configure them for local control without having to flash new firmware and I have a 5-pack of them that I can use for testing. My main concern is whether they’ll get a strong enough WiFi signal sitting behind the outlets. I have a Sonoff Basic that I took out of its plastic housing, wrapped it in electrical tape and crammed it (not at all easily) behind the light switch for my kitchen lights. It has basically worked flawlessly (except when my WiFi is down or when I do something really stupid). But it seems like behind a wall switch and behind a wall socket are two very different environments.
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I like the shellys because they are UL listed and designed to handle the full outlet amperage continuously and can monitor the power draw
Even the full size sonoff is only 10A max, which may be more than enough, but now you have an artificial limit on the outlet that does not conform to its socket specification
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