So my wife started a new job for a small company where the heat in the offices isn’t the greatest and everyone has space heaters under their desk. But I know my wife is going to forget (or at least worry about forgetting) to turn it off at the end of the day.
My solution was to setup a smart plug pre-flashed with Tasmota so the on/off automations can run locally on the device. All you need to get it setup is a smart phone (mine is an iPhone) and a smart plug flashed with Tasmota.
1. Hotspot Setup - The first step is to turn on your hotspot. On an iPhone, you just launch the Settings… Tap on Personal Hotpsot… Tap Allow Others to Join. If you’ve never done this before you’ll need to setup a password. For Android is fairly similar. Just go to Settings…Connections…Mobile hotspot and tethering… Enable Mobile Hotpsot. Tap the words “Mobile Hotspot” to bring up the options you can set (Network name, Password, Band - leave it at 2.4 GHz).
2. Plug Setup - Now you just follow the usual steps for setting up a Tasmota smart plug: plug it into the outlet, go to your wifi settings and choose the new one shown by your plug. Then you launch a browser and follow the instructions for accessing the WebUI included with the plug (Some devices will launch the captive page on their own if you wait for it). For me that was navigating a browser to http://192.168.4.1. From there you just select the name of your hotspot from the list, type in the password and tap Save.
If you let the device reload with the new wifi settings it should stay connected. The new IP address will be listed in the address bar or you can find it by tapping the Information button on the WebUI. For me it was 172.20.10.2 because my iPhone defaulted to 172.20.10.1 as the router.
3. Configuration - Now we need to set the latitude & longitude of your device because the default location is the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. So don’t miss this step or your timers will be all messed up because they’ll be for the wrong time zone. The easiest way is to go to this website in another tab (https://tasmota-tz.cloudfree.io/), use the map to set your location, copy the auto generated command, go back to the Tasmota tab, click on Console, paste the command into the input field and tap Return on the keyboard. Now when you set your timers they will be for the correct time zone.
4. Make timers - To get to the timers interface tap Configuration and then Configure Timer.
- Check off Enable Timers
- Tap the number of the timer you want to set (Max of 16)
- The output is only 1 on a single outlet plug
- Select the action you want to take
- Check off Enable so the timer will run
- Check of Repeat so it will always run and not just once
- Select the trigger Sunrise, sunset, or a specific time (24 hour)
- Select the days of the week you want it to run
- Click Save when you’re all done writing your timers
*** I set timer one to turn on Monday through Friday when she starts work and I set timer two to turn off Monday through Friday when she’s done work.
5. (iOS Optional) Home Screen App - In iOS you can also create a web shortcut on your home screen. Just launch Safari (if you haven’t already) and navigate to the IP address of your plug (again, mine was http://172.20.10.2). At the bottom of your Safari window tap the share button, scroll down and select Add to Home Screen, Now you can name your shortcut, then tap Add.
Now the smart plug timers will work without a hub or a wifi connection1. If you need to make any changes just turn on your hotspot and launch the shortcut or plug the IP address into your browser.
1 The one caveat is that if the outlet it’s plugged into loses power for an extended period of time the internal clock of the smart plug will be off. Just turn on your hotspot, allow it to connect to pull down the current date/time, and turn off the hotspot again.