One of the easiest ways to start your journey fitting out a smart home is to begin with remote-controlled plug sockets. With gadgets like D-Link’s Wi-Fi Smart Plug, it’s not only very easy to do it yourself, no installer needed, and it’s very affordable too.
The D-Link DSP-W115 Wi-Fi Smart Plug was launched easier this year. It’s plug socket that connects to the cloud so you can remotely control from a mobile app on your smartphone. Another trick this Wi-Fi Smart Plug does is integartion with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. For this review, I’ll just focus on using the plug socket itself, and I’ll do a separate post on Google Assistant integration at a later time.
Plug sockets are one of the easiest gadgets to get started with when fitting out a smart home. You just plug the D-Link Wi-Fi Smart Plug into an existing wall socket (or power bar), then plug your lamp or other electrical appliance into the smart plug. The D-Link Wi-Fi Smart Plug just switches on or off the power supply to the connected device.
To setup, you’ll need the mydlink mobile app, available on both Android and iOS. The app is quite intuitive to use. You will need a mydlink account. From within the app, add a new device, scan the bar code on the underside of the Wi-Fi Smart Plug, and just follow the on-screen instructions. A dedicated WPS pairing button on the side of the Wi-Fi Smart Plug makes it easy to pair it up to your home’s Wi-Fi, provided of course your Wi-Fi router supports WPS push-button.
Once the D-Link Wi-Fi Smart Plug is connects to the cloud via your home’s Wi-Fi, you can control it on your smartphone, whether you’re in another room at home, or somewhere else across the world.
There’s a dedicated on-off button on the D-Link Wi-Fi Smart Plug too, so you can also directly switch on or off the power, without having to find your smartphone. The last button on the plug is to turn on or off the LED on the plug itself.
Here’s a smart video to demonstrate the D-Link Wi-Fi Smart Plug in action.
The best thing about using a smart socket plug like this D-Link Wi-Fi Smart Plug is that you don’t need any professional installer to set it up. You can use it to connect a lamp, a fan, or other electrical appliance. It’s best that the connected appliance is “dumb”, with a conventional switch that can be left in the “on” position so that the Wi-FI Smart Plug can effectively control its operation.
There can, of course, be other use cases. I’ve heard people wanting to totally shutting off their TV console (including set top box, game console, etc) at a certain time every night. These features are all controlled in the mydlink mobile app. You can configure schedules to turn on and off the plug, or to setup triggers in combination with other smart home gadgets. You can also configure one-tap buttons that set-off a series of actions, such as to turn off all your plugs when you when you are getting out of your home.
The D-Link Wi-Fi Smart Plug retails at $39, and it is readily available in many IT retailers like Challenger, Courts, and online at Lazada and Hachi.Tech.
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