But you can only enable this for all your devices, not one by one, so it wouldn’t be so good if you had a heater plugged into it. We really liked the option in the app to prevent all your devices from turning back on after a power outage – it’s no fun when the lights blast you at 2 a.m. We set it up with a lamp in a bedroom and it responded quickly to voice controls through Alexa and Google, as well as to actions in the app. The app has time of use tracking and appears to offer basic energy reporting – showing how many watts a device has used, although during our testing it never budged off 0 watts. There’s also a vacation mode that will simulate presence for you. But you can put anything you want into this compact smart plug and turn it on or off, set a schedule for it or create a scene. The plug is really designed as an accessory to add lamps to your Wiz smart lighting setup – and the app has a circadian rhythm feature where you can set all your Wiz lights to help you relax or wakeup. It features a range of inexpensive smart bulbs and now the Wiz smart plug. Wiz is a low cost, Wi-Fi based smart lighting line from Signify, the makers of Philip’s Hue lighting line. If you need a compact smart plug for a tight space, they don’t come much smaller than the new Wiz Smart Plug (£17). Price: £12 | Check price on Amazon | Argos | Ebuyer Pros: Reliable app with good features easy to set up Cons: Quite large energy monitoring costs more This will let you group multiple devices together, use Scenes to tell different devices to do different things with one tap, and create Automations so your lamp can turn on when your camera senses motion. The Kasa smart home lineup has cameras and smart light bulbs too, so you can kit out a decent smart home with these products. Plus, it also has a handy runtime report so you can see how long the device was used for. You can create a timer to have something run for a set length of time (handy for a space heater) or turn something on in a set amount of time (like your electric blanket just before you sit down for dinner).Īn 'Away' mode randomly turn plugs on and off during a set period of time – ideal for using with lamps and perhaps a radio when you’re on your hols. The Kasa app lets you set schedules to turn your device on or off based on time, sunrise or sunset. This means that while you can use integrations with third party services like Alexa and IFTTT, you don’t need to rely on them to do some really useful things, While it’s not the smallest smart plug we tested, it’s compact enough to fit nicely behind the couch, slim enough not to block the outlet switch (although as with all of these it has one on the device) and it works with the superb Kasa app – the gold standard for smart plug apps.Īll Kasa smart plugs (and the company has a wide range – including a Kasa Smart Plug with energy monitoring – £20) work with the Kasa app, which offers the best features of any we tested.

TP Link’s Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Plug Slim (£12) is our top pick because it gets pretty much everything right. Read our list of the best headphones for our favourite picks in every category. Every product featured has been properly tested by WIRED reviewers. WIRED Recommends is your definitive guide to the best technology.

View the Eve Energy Smart Plug & Power Meter for £45 on Amazon But you do need an iPhone to use it and a HomeKit hub to control it from outside the house. It does a deep dive into energy monitoring you just won’t find elsewhere, and the automations you can create around energy use are unrivalled. View the Meross Smart Wi-Fi Plug Mini for £17 on Amazonįor those who hanker after a smart plug with energy monitoring – an excellent feature that fewer and fewer plugs are offering in the race to the bottom dollar – we recommend the Eve Energy Smart Plug & Power Meter (£45).

And this diminutive device will fit nicely into an Apple Home setup, while still being accessible to Alexa and Google should you have a three-way going on in your house. It’s strange to hear the words budget and HomeKit in the same sentence, but it’s true. If you are a Apple loyalist however, our budget HomeKit smart plug pick, the Meross Smart Wi-Fi Plug Mini (£17) is the one to get.

Smart timer bulb socket