What Smart Plugs to buy?

Hardware
1

Hi,
I am setting up my Smart Home and I am not sure which Smart Plugs to get.
With these Plugs I also want to decide if I want to focus on Matter or Zigbee.
I want the Plugs to track my energy use.
What are your recommendations?

2

Be careful of zigbee for energy monitoring. Some zigbee plugs can flood your zigbee network causing devices to drop off.

I went with wifi switches from athom because they’re esp32 so they’re open and ready to update. No issues with them so far.

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3

I’d be curious to hear which Zigbee devices flood the network. I’ve got smart energy monitoring plugs from several different vendors and haven’t seen this issue.

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4

I went with Zigbee at first to just play and learn Zigbee in general, now basically Zigbee is my standard for any device that solely need interaction from HA.

I currently have 18 Zigbee (Tuya) plugs (TS011F) paired to via a SMLight SLZB-06 coordinator with 2 X 2 Channel current clamps for High Load devices and whole home load.

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5

Thanks for the feedback.
I heard mostly bad things about Tuya but nice to know that there are people without negative experience. :slight_smile:

6

Tuya && zigbee usually works nicely with your own zigbee coordinator and ZHA or zigbee2mqtt.

Tuya && WiFi is better avoided, as it depends on their cloud infrastructure.

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7

Weird. Me too have about 20 Zigbee energy monitoring plugs from different vendors around and none of them is flooding the Zigbee network :thinking:

8

Just avoid Tuya WiFi based devices. As for Tuya Zigbee based devices there are no problems.

9

I regretted to use Zigbee once I reached about 50+ Zigbee v1.2 devices. It’s a nightmare to scale. You really need multiple Zigbee coordinators to make it scable, not just adding more Zigbee routers.

I now uses Xiaomi BLE Mesh devices for most of sensors. (Scales really well and no need to re-pair after replacing the hub) Philips Hue Bluetooth for most of light bulbs… And of course 20+ Zigbee sensors as I still have lots of them hanging around and 20+ 2.4Ghz Wifi devices.

10

How long is “so far” … past the end of the warranty ?

Down here in Oz there isn’t a lot of choice with our particular layout of prongs and certification … but last time I checked most are wi-fi, and almost all fail between 1-2 years.

They are getting cheap enough to throw away, but I can’t be bothered setting them up and changing my automations knowing it’s only temporary. So I am also interested.

11

Honestly, if you’re not already caught in the ZigBee system or are really tight on budget, there is no reason not to use Matter-over-Thread. Currently, your options are either Eve Energy or Bosch Plug +M (necessary for higher loads). See here. (The Meross one works fine, but uses WiFi. If you don’t mind the downsides of WiFi, I would rather recommend something ESPHome-based, e.g. Athom.)