I’m designing HA smart home automations for my GFs new house - I want to show her automation vs. smart home products slowly and easily. I’m going to first focus on her outside hanging light lamps - she has those cute hanging lights all around here backyard and front house facia.
I want to know what brand/model of smart plugs to buy - they have to be 3-prong U.S. and I only need on/off from this automation. I’m going to tie her and her mothers cell phone into the setup and do different rules for if ANY BT phone is connected to HA, turn on outside lights at dusk till 1AM. If no phones present, turn on from dusk till 11PM, etc etc.
Does anyone have suggestions of smart plugs? AND/OR (BONUS) - is there a list somewhere of good hardware to use for OTHER applications? I don’t want to use another Ring doorbell, August lock or Nest thermostat - I’d like to buy hardware that is HA friendly, local, a good value and quality… thanks for reading - help me knock it out of the park for her.
I’m reusing my HA Blue ODROID-N2 for the time being - I don’t think her setup will be taxing at all. Just HACS, tailscale Add-On and a few integrations… I can remote in to manage the box. THANKS, HA Community!
You said outdoor lights, but do you need an outdoor rated smart plug or not? If not, I’ve been pretty happy with these Zigbee plugs from Third Reality. They have energy monitoring which is nice.
Otherwise, if you need something outdoor rated for now my best recommendation is a Z-Wave one from Zooz. They have a single and dual plug version, and can do the new long range mode if you’re going to exterior plugs far from the main house.
I don’t have a good recommendation for a Zigbee outdoor plug. I have two Enbrighten ones, but I found Enbrighten devices don’t play well with larger Zigbee networks and caused problems with other Zigbee devices.
For Wifi, most (theoretically all) Matter labeled plugs should work. Third Reality also makes a Matter over WiFi plug. No experience with their Matter bulb, but can also vouch for the zigbee variant.
HA supports HomeKit devices locally, so most HomeKit labeled plugs will works as well. Simpler to set up than Matter.
Shelly has a US plug and a good local integration.
TP Link Kasa and Tapo also have local integrations.
www.athom.tech has esphome flashed WiFi plugs - about as close as you can get to a “native” HA plug.
There are probably others as well. As long as they are supported as a local integration (all above are), any would fit your simple on/off needs.
I have a number of these newer esp32 versions, which notably support the esphome “Bluetooth proxy” capability which might come in handy if you’re trying to detect a phone’s presence. My favorite plugs are the ones that let me install local, open source firmware.
I also have a number of Z-wave plugs and find them somewhat of a hassle because (a) they can’t easily be moved around without leaving a hole in my mesh taking days to heal, and (b) if they even have power monitoring you often need to dial back the reporting frequency because the low-bandwidth mesh can’t handle too much traffic.
At my local Home Depot, they sell a Feit Electric 15 Amp 120-Volt Outdoor Smart Wi-Fi Dual Outlet Wall Plug-In, No Hub Required (3-Pack) - these are outdoor plugs, but Feit Electric isn’t listed in HA’s Integrations…
ChatGPT sayes there isn’t an official “Feit” integration available directly in Home Assistant. These plugs typically operate on the Tuya/Smart Life platform, which means HA doesn’t support them out of the box under the “Feit” branding. But also states that You can integrate Feit plugs using the stock Tuya integration in Home Assistant, but it requires linking through their cloud and isn’t ideal for local control.
But I don’t see Tuya or Smart Life listed anywhere on the Feit product page linked above…
Kasa Outdoor Smart Plug, Smart Home Wi-Fi Outlet Timer, Max Load 15A/1875W, IP64 Weather Resistance, Compatible with Alexa, Google Home & SmartThings, No Hub Required, ETL Certified(KP401)
They use Wi-Fi and Matter - and seem to have integrations built into HA. Can anyone agree that these will be a good fit?
You need to research a bit more and choose one or a few technologies.
Zigbee, Z-wave and Thread (Matter over Thread) forms mesh networks that can be extended pretty hæfar by having mains power devices, like smart plug øs and light bulbs. The more devices the better.
WiFi is star shaped from the AP and al though WiFi is powerful it does have limits and might have dropouts due to noise. A mesh network will form around noisy places
I’d verify that those are truly local. My experience with Kasa and TP-Link are that they really, really want to use a cloud server. Like, with firmware updates blocking local access. Maybe things have changed since I last tried them, but I remain skeptical.
Kasa had a “security patch” at one point that shutdown the port for third party access.
They turned back on it after an outcry from home automation users, but whether they learnt from it is hard to say.
I avoid them from then on.
TY for the reply/info - for this application the customer doesn’t care too much about native apps that call home; just that I can automate the devices w/ HA.
These have matter and homekit - hopefully enough so that I can get them controlled via HA.
While nearly all of my plugs are Zigbee, I have exactly one of these. It’s connected to my Home Assistant system in case I need to reboot it, so it needs to work when Home Assistant is down! It’s been rock solid for 3 years now.
I have used the Kasa outdoor plug for 1 year in HA until the plug finally died from getting too wet. The plug does need an internet connection and does send error messages of going off-line at times. It does seem to recover on its own and come back online. To be perfectly honest, I replaced the Kasa plug with a new Kasa plug. The reason being was that I could not find a descent outdoor plug on Amazon that was Zigbee.
Though when I first started my home automation adventure I started out with KASA/TAPO plugs and switches, I now dislike them because of their constant error reporting and wifi necessity, and have been replacing them slowly with Lutron switches and ThirdReality (Zigbee) plugs. I get zero reported errors from these and they have worked rock-solid. Now if I could get a reliable outdoor zigbee plug, I could rid myself of this Kasa one.
I installed these this weekend, and grouped a bunch of Outdoor String Lights with an HA ‘Helper’ - seems to work just fine; I’ll go with some esphome plugs for better HA integration, but for my needs and wanting something rated for OUTDOOR use, I like these so far…
The only issue is with HA now; the automation I created doesn’t accurately set the Home/Away using my girlfriends iPhone… I made sure to give HA background app access, but still no [good] dice.
I think I might have to add some THING where the automation also checks to see if that iPhone is ON the Wi-Fi at the HA house.
More suggestions…
