45% off RRP$19. $17.86 for the model with dual USB ports (1 USB-A + 1 USB-C), 38% off RRP$29. Cheapest option available for a smart plug with Wi-Fi power monitoring since BIG W stopped selling the very popular Crest Smart Plug.
It's gonna be based on Tuya so yes. I have a bunch of other similar ones. Set them up with the Tuya Smart app instead of the app specified on the instructions. In Home Assistant you can use the built in Tuya integration. I prefer local control so I use the custom integrations LocalTuya (from HACS) for most of my gear and Tuya Local for anything it can't pick up (one lousy light globe).
For $10 energy monitoring sockets, I'm willing to overlook how you can't cut them off the internet or else they go zombie. My goal is to isolate all my IoT gear, but $10 is $10!
I bought 5, had a random voucher in my ebay account that gave me a slightly larger discount than TOP6DEC if I spent $50.
Can you pls recommend any detailed guides on how to make the tuya devices work locally instead of everything via cloud ?
Keen on this one - but I couldnt figure out if using this will block (or not) the other power outlet on a double GPO faceplate? Anyone knows and can confirm?
Laser are selling what looks to be an identical model, but using the same or similar pictures.
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/125782595475
The are more expensive but if Bing Lee run out you can still try some and see what you think.
Laser model: LSH-PLGPM-001
Bing Lee model: CSH-PLGPM-001
Pretty similar I’d guess.
Dimensions on Laser’s eBay listing I think. Go into full description and scroll down. Might help working out if they are thin enough to put two in side by side on a double GPO
Thanks mate. The listing show this:
66 x 43.5 x 57.5 mm.
Not sure which one is the width value - 43.5mm or the 57.5mm - if the width is 43.5mm it should be okay as the other GPO outlet is not affected. if 57.5mm, i think this will render the other outlet redundant.
What’s wrong with the TP Link Tapo P110?
More likely to have wider support as I believe TP-Link have used Tuya as there underlying communication tech. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. I have four P110 which are direct connected to my phone via Wifi but I’m installing a TP Limk Tapo Smart hub and will redirect everything to that.
Yep no doubt this is cheap and there possibly is support on Hone Assistant but I’ve found brand name stuff seems to get a higher amount of support for brand name products.
I know people have had problem with the P110, I got them for $15 each from Amazon on sale and so far they haven’t had an issue (touch wood) they are showing me pretty detailed power consumption through the Tapo iOS app and imagine the Android app would be similar.
However I’m always on the look out for a better product and if these are better and you can get more granular details from their app then please let me know. I’m with the previous poster that any IoT or Home Automation stays inside my network. So if these are cloud monitored or something then that’s not really what I want.
The next section is long and most people will skip it or might find it interesting. I got carried away.
TL;DR - cost of living and convincing people that Home Automation will make their lives better has ground to a halt because people have no money / we get calls because people have recommended us more than finding our ad online
We cut all advertising costs six months ago - it wasn’t brining in enough work - word of mouth got us more work than paying to be on the tradie sites or briefly we paid Google for ad sponsor listings and that was not cheap. We figure everyone goes to Google but we found that maybe four clicks a month, just didn’t justify the costs.
Anyway back to Tapo
This is a long post about my thoughts on Home Automation after trying to sell it to people and how expensive quotes can get because of the high prices on gear and all the various bits to make it work and of course WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) / Partner Acceptance.
I talk about my own home, I live alone and I can justify a few things but ultimately it just adds up and I’m not earning enough to fill my house with gadgets that I really don’t need.
Then I talk about customers and what they think it’s going to cost cs what in reality it’s going to cost.
It’s probably better suited as a forum post but since I already started I got carried away.
I decided the Tapo range for home and often recommend it because it’s not tied to a subscription and it’s not the best, but far from the worst - pretty decent performance from a company which produces from cheap to expensive in Networking gear and their prices if you don’t want to deck out your entire house at once which far too many customers are just blown away by the price - since I often talk to people about this stuff I can give them an idea of price but this year has been hard if not impossible to get many jobs - people don’t have the money —
And consequently I can’t test all this gear out myself because I don’t have the money and I don’t really plan on decking my entire house out with automation unless it’s actually worthwhile.
Swapping a switch for a sensor is great in the garage, but I bought one seven years ago that the car would turn on two overhead LED Fluoro Tube replacements.
Yes, it would be nice to control that garage sensor via my Tapo app but I did like seven years ago and HA was super niche and expensive at the time.
I can always swap it out if I decide I want to but putting cameras inside the house or even sensors in rooms it just feels lazy - yes - you can remove a switch and put a fancy PIR sensor in so when you leave the toilet it switches the light and fan off after five minutes that would be good. But the rest of the switches in the house because I have SAL LED lights which are flush with the ceiling have a nice brushed satin ring and these are the model before their own automation system Pixie, to replace the switches to Pixie controlled ones will cost me $400 which I don’t have.
Because I work with an electrician if we need to run power he has told me what he has done in his own home but more importantly how long some of this stuff takes to get sorted out and working properly. I have more tech knowledge than him but he bought a lot of stuff early on at wholesale prices and now regrets a lot of his choices.
I knew about SAL before I started working with him but I’m totally sold on the brand and I’d hard pressed to buy some of the other lighting brands out there as for LED strips - they look nice, but they are expensive and unless they have major lighting issues in the house it’s an indulgence.
All the SAL brand light - that’s a pro brand a lot of electricians use and I have to say I’m impressed with them - all the crap LED or some stupid halogen lights I replaced when I moved in seven years ago. The SAL flush ceiling lights were about $18 with a transformer and either a white or brushed satin silver ring, and don’t even get hot enough to require a heat sink unlike some old LED lights I still have and will replace when they die, the SAL lights already are capable of dimming and you can switch three colour temps, most of mine are on 3000K and they are as pleasant as old incandescent- and like I said they can all integrate to SAL’s Pixe automation system which is probably not supported by Home Assistant but yes, there is a use case for PIR switches to turn lights on and off, I’ve given one example already. But my entire house has LED lighting. Outside I have some 80W Halogen which I could finally replace with LED which are as bright but at $30 for the cheaper ones and about $50 for Cree chips, LED is now bright enough to replace Old 100W incandescent or 60-80W Halogen for outside lighting it’s just expensive and it’s not on long enough for me to care.
Most of my indoor lights don’t exceed 8W though I have some 11W where I need extra brightness, it’s not easy replacing lights built into the fan. If you have a cover on you cook the electronics and you might only get 1-2 years or less out of the LED globe. It’s cheaper to buy a new overhead fan with LED lighting built in and that’s on the the to do list but my 8W and 11W flush ceiling mounted lights whether you want to measure in lumens or lux, what they put out is totally sufficient. Of course lighting is a style thing in many houses which is why if people want particular types of lights in their house the books I have from various lighting manufacturers are endless- I know just have half a dozen pages bookmarked and trust me, customers much prefer the books than looking on a laptop screen or iPad screen. It’s just getting harder to get the books from the manufacturers or suppliers. So it’s off to Officeworks and colour print several pages for a few brands.
The money thing is the killer and has been since COVID but since interest rates went up the cost of some of items jumped, some we can get on a deal, but we’ve tried to not put up the labour costs too much but alas it’s a tough market.
Spending hundreds of dollars to automate every part of your home sounds good in theory but the people who I’ve seen do it have spent into the thousands, not hundreds and gone totally overboard. Most start off small then have multiple brands so have to get Home Asdistant, but lots of people who do this stuff themselves, where possible they do it over time and spread out the costs. I still think most brands are too expensive - Tapo isn’t too bad - if you want to go really cheap you can import Tuya stuff from Aliexpress but we don’t sell that to our customers - it’s rare any of that stuff has C-Tick and we aren’t going to pay for it. What’s worse is if you install not C-Tick gear your insurance company, if you had a fire can refuse to pay out. So that’s another reason we stick with the bigger brand names plus we know if we have to do Home Assistant usually on a Pi 4 if you can get stock,
Stuff I learned in the past few years:
Police don’t want your camera footage. A mate of mine offered the camera footage when his house got broken into and he had outdoor and indoor cameras, you can clearly see faces, but cops weren’t interested - unless insurance companies offer discounts for putting in cameras which they don’t I can’t see the point. Yes I have parcels stolen from my front door so I might put a camera out there or doorbell camera.
Cloud subscriptions don’t sound a lot but most customers when I tell them it’s $5-$10 a month for as long as they want their footage and some have 365 day limits, I say how often are you going to spend hours scrolling at 16x speed through security camera footage.
As most people know, most brands offer cloud subscriptions which just make the whole thing more expensive. It’s something we talk about. I only had one customer ever want to sign up. Most can deal with the default 30 days - especially if we are using TP-Link Tapo gear where we can drop in the Pro/Max Endurance microSD cards which are designed for huge amounts of rewrites. 256GB is the sweet spot price wise. That is usually enough for 30 days of storage as well.
Eufy can’t be trusted but has some good products, Tapo has microSD cards and the latest Eufy Home Station 3 finally includes ram and external HDD upgrade. The Home Base Station 2 which is the most common had 16Gb only on it and it’s not expandable. However $380 to replace with Home Base 3 is a lot of money.
We still quote Eufy as they are at all the stores so people have seen the brand but we mention there’s been some security question marks about how secure your footage is even though it’s supposed to be stored locally.
Sorry this post is so long - just saying there are things definitely worth doing like monitoring energy consumption, maybe an IR sensor to turn a light on or off but doing the whole house, me personally I priced out into the thousands with everything I could possibly put in, when I stripped that down just to the stuff I thought would be useful, I was still well over $1000 and I’d need HA to get shit to talk to each other. As I already have a mix of Tuya and Xiaomi. I also have a bunch of different brands of temp and humidity sensors all over the house. They don’t trigger anything but they could. I’m going probably dump the Xiaomi and keep the unknown brand I have which operate on three triple A and are readable but they use Zigbee, so I mostly have Zigbee and Wifi devices with a cheap Chinese gateway which nearly all use the identical chip to communicate. Pretty sure those $25 gateways can be set to mesh if you have a big enough house that needs it. Otherwise buy two and mesh network them. However you are restricted to the two Tuya apps that are available on iOS and probably similar on Android.
Due to having very little work this past year, I’ve got limited income so maybe other people can afford to spend the dollars, I just think right now the limited brands we have access to and their often over inflated prices, plus subscriptions for cameras, just don’t justify it.
Which is why we had a hard year.
I got a Wifi controller for my Dakin A/C units in living room and bedroom and I’ve used it once. Normally I put it on a timer as I know the house will be hot anyway, and I run it at 20C and it’s not that expensive if I am out of the house. It I’m home more than I’m out. Coming home to a house which was 30C (I used to do that in my first apartment) and sure I could have left the A/C running all day, but I didn’t realise all the things I was cooking in the house and being on 3rd floor apartment despite having insulation and eventually some cheaper double glazed windows on where the Sun hit, stuff that was glued together, it ruined the glue, I didn’t realise at the time many medications must be kept under 25C and before I started photocopying all thermal receipts I didn’t realise exposure to just moderate heat makes certain brands of paper fade and these were the days before smartphones and it was a pain scanning - shit was slow back in 2000.
Life is easier now but I still can’t justify the cost of full HA in my house and though there are some use cases for it if you control everything through your phone and then your phone breaks or you smash it or it gets stolen how do you control shit then?
I appreciate that is why people use HA to run things for themselves but my personal feeling is that we are reinventing the wheel and paying a lot to do it. If it’s a hobby and you can afford it, great, but most tech friends I’ve spoken to about it have started off doing HA and realised the costs involved and it’s gotta be Wife / Partner friendly else you will just get grief all the time. Especially on the cost.
I appreciate not all women have no tech savvy but I’ve met many from ages of 25 to 60 and older and they just aren’t interested. They just see it as a gimmick. If it’s super easy to control and doesn’t require an app to use it, then maybe partners might be more accepting.
But prior to COVID I used to have a business where we would go into older houses and rip out the old phone cabling, put in CAT6 and terminate at a single point for NBN and typical quote was $400-$600 depending on the age and access and since I was doing the quoting the male typically wanted to try to get better internet speeds on FTTN and home cabling replacement would somerimes get them an extra 10-20Mbs but could be no difference so we always told them that up front. We’d then get the ISP involved etc.
We had a big disclaimer that we would check the distance to the node and fixing the cabling in the house Might give them a bit of extra speed but usually we ran at least one Ethernet port to their TV and I’d do heat maps of their WiFi coverage and suggest an Access Point as Mesh Networking was still too expensive and there would always be a question of “why do we need this?” typically from a female partner.
I still hear the same stuff when I talk to people about HA when I quote - I don’t do the cabling as I have a stuffed back but I work with an electrician and telco cabler and I still have my Telco cabling license.
We always talk about “yes we can do WiFi but cabling is more reliable” but it’s always house dependent.
Getting mesh working well in some people’s houses is a PITA - it should be easy but people don’t have the money to spend a lot on this stuff.
COVID ruined all the NBN cabling we were doing so now we try to convince them to do some HA along with the telco cabling replacement.
But quotes once you put in 8” Google or Amazon screens or 12” even more, the prices skyrocket and people can’t afford it.
The cost of living crisis has nearly killed our business and sure we get a few older people who want cameras after a break in or wjo want auto lights on outside, some of these jobs - seriously they are one camera a screen or mobile phone app but anyone over 60 wants a screen - and we always mention telephone cabling cabling in the older houses - you can sell people on upgrading their electrical wiring easier than telephone wiring even though they live in in a sixty year old or older house and often still have mode 610 sockets. Despite the fact that you’d expect someone would have ripped them all out, I seem to recall if you make enough noise about it with your RSP, they call NBN who then call Telstra and get some tech to come in and do the fastest rip out old cable or just disconnect the cable and run one new one. From outside the house to a single 6P4C point or I’ve seen a few 8P8C which is against S008 regulations - telco should be 6P4C or 8P4C or 8P2C at the minimum.
They spent a huge amount of time rewriting the S008 and S009 regulations for telco, networking including HFC, even has done Satellite in there saying you must run RG-6 Quad and terminate with a F connector for both HFC and Satellite.
Most antenna installers have been using RG-6 Quad and F connectors for TV since they chanced the licensing regs back in 2012 - they generally then run a made up F to Belling Lee connector sometimes erroneously referred to as a PAL antenna plug. In regional areas because UHF is used for DVB-T2 - you often have to get a 700MHz low pass filter so mobile phone signals from the low end 4G doesn’t leak into your TV - usually it isn’t a problem but depends on how close you are to a cell tower.
Sorry again for the long post - maybe some people found some stuff interesting, maybe it’s was TL;DR.
I didn’t mean to do such a massive info dump here. But maybe people will see this more likely than the forum. If the mods want to move this I understand.
Whoa
Yeah sorry
Damn son.. Are you the next chatgpt?
And here I was thinking Tolstoy was no longer with us.
Write a book. You can sell your ideas LOL
You really must have had nothing to do during your night shift 🤣
Cool story bro.
Hi dman1 If all you've done with the TP Link Tapo P110 that this book started with is plug them in and use the app on your phone to control them, then the only way they are working is via cloud monitoring.
Wow. U really do elaborate a lot.
I am just sharing my experience with the Tapo P110. I have several of this model in the house, 2 of which have failed. The way they fail are both similar - i.e. the internal relays keep clicking in and out rapidly and the unit cannot be detected by the app anymore.
I dont think i would be buying anymore of these Tapo outlets.
Trying to add this to my cart but I get this error. Does anyone know how to fix this?
This item can't be added to your cart because you don't meet the seller's requirements.
EDIT
turns out Bing Lee blocked me from buying from them. No idea why
Grabbed 2 for $17 using a Plus $5 off $15+ spend code…
the one with usb, can we also control on / off / timer for those 2x usb ports? for example i can turn off on from app, and schedule on off ?
i think just the plug.
found the manual https://media.binglee.com.au/f/b/6/6/fb662acb98475587fa0d2d0…
No, the USB ports are always on. It's just the socket that has remote switching/monitoring.
What benefit is this if you don't have any google or Alexa?
I bought a couple just so I can monitor/check how much power different things around the house are using, semi-confident this is fairly simple through the app… (Not sure I'll go much further, I really dont have the need for automation, but they will give me something to tinker with when I'm bored)
Turn the Christmas tree lights on and off.
Looks like sold out? eBay advising no quantities left.
Yeh, OOS…
Tried again about 20 minutes later and managed to pick up 3. So keep trying I'd you're keen.
Back up but click and collect only.
If anyone wants these units I posted a link to eBay for Laser who sell the identical model but they would be $2-4 or so dollars more expensive.
But I confirmed the model numbers from Bing Lee are almost exactly tte same as Laser branded smart plug - obviously I can’t be 100% sure, but I’ll take 99.5% sure they are exactly the same and Laser oem through their Chinese factory any brand you want on them but I’d be willing to be they are nearly identical.
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/125782595475
That’s if anyone is still interested. It’s a new month and new year so discounts may have changed but at least you won’t miss out, they are just a bit more expensive than Bing Lee.
Cheers.
Honestly. Buy one and it’s maybe $15 at most, or send it back if you really hate it.
stock back up but code is expired
Anyone knows if it works with Home Assistant?