What are the best UK plugs with energy monitoring

What price do they go on sale for? £39 is quite a lot for a plug.

I’m using these zigbee outlets to monitor my server and they have been rock solid so far.
PROS

  • Cheap at around £10 each.
  • 16A relay, which gives it enough overhead for most devices with a 13A fuse.
  • Small form factor allows you to place 2 side by side in a double socket & doesn’t obstruct the switch.
  • Reliable (but see the cons list).
  • Child lock switch which disables turning off the plug when pressing the onboard button.
  • Power outage memory setting to dictate whether to turn back on/off after a power outage, or whether to default to the last known state.
  • Fully supported in Z2MQTT.
  • EDIT: They act as zigbee routers

CONS

  • They’re Tuya, so the quality will depend on whether the whitelabel vendor is cutting corners. The ones I linked to have been stable so far.
  • They use polling to get the energy monitoring data. In my case it’s not an issue because I’m not interested in millisecond precision - I just want to know the average load on my devices. Also, reporting interval can be changed in Z2MQTT.
  • They initially had a bug where they would randomly report 0 consumption even when on. This has now been fixed in Z2MQTT and I haven’t seen a false reading since then.

I get that buying stuff (especially Tuya) from ali isn’t for everyone, but maybe the above mini-review will be helpful.

I have looked at them several times in my search, but the main issue is that they’re not routers. That’s the killer for me. Otherwise they’d be my go to.

If you’re replying to me, yes, they ARE indeed routers. I just forgot to add it in the list of pros (will edit it in soon).
Here’s your proof:


2 Likes

Thanks for the update. I just ordered one for 48p as a first order.
I know you said that it’s good for z2mqtt, have you heard or seen if they play okay with zha?

Lol. This is amazing then. Just ordered a 4 pack.

PS. Damn forum doesn’t show the “Reply to” even when I used that button.

I have no idea, but given how long the false 0 power readings took to fine tune in Z2MQTT, I’d go in with the expectation that it’s not fully resolved in ZHA.

Have a look around the ZHA github (or these forums) for TS011F, maybe the issue was indeed resolved.

Yeah there seems to be some kind of bug with showing who you’re replying to. I’ve taken to using the quote function to avoid this.

I paid £26.99 each for the Hive plugs on Amazon

sometimes the nicer plugs that play well are more expensive. I love my salus ones as they have always been right for the job, but unless they are on special, its too expensive

Agree, Hive devices are pricey but they’re the strongest most reliable routers in my network. Sonoff and IKEA have been the opposite, cheap and unreliable (except the IKEA GU10s, they seem to do a good job). Aqara wall switches have been just fine.

I have a few different products -
Smartthings - been using 2 on my washer and dryer to monitor power to alert when starting and completing. Generally working as intended, however had a couple of times over 18 months where they randomly turned off and dropped off network so had to press the button the socket to reset.
Aetotec Z-wave - Have 2 of these connected to my server power strips, Had zero problems with these other than being pricey.
Athom - Bought a stack of these and replacing all the tplink etc plugs for ESPhome. A little early to decide on these but they seem solid and price point is very attractive. A little more cumbersome to add to HA then just say a zwave plug, however all local!

Did the Smartthings plugs actually turn off i.e. cut the electricity flow or just drop off your zigbee network? That’s happened to me a couple of time over 18 months with the Hive plugs but in my situation they just dropped off the network but the power to my appliances remained on.