I don’t have a home that’s as “smart” as many these days. I don’t, for instance, have smart door locks or window shades. I certainly don’t have any fancy lighting systems.
However, I do have three smart outlets from Meross. I’ve used a couple of different brands in the past, but right now my outlets are from Meross, and I’m very happy with them. As background, I worry about fire and general safety. As a result, my first smart outlet went into my sewing room. This one turns on early in the morning (though I still need to manually turn on the iron itself). It turns off in the evening. No big deal, right? But, just in case I’ve forgotten to turn off the iron, the outlet also turns off when I leave home, and the outlet turns on again when I arrive home. No worries about the iron possibly setting a piece of fabric on fire!
Similarly, I have a lamp plugged into a second smart outlet. This one turns on in the evening when no one is home — hopefully giving the impression that someone is there. It turns off again when someone arrives, and I can turn it on manually via my iPhone, if we need it while at home.
The third outlet is the one that’s the most obvious to the observer; it’s my favorite. It’s in the living room and, most of the year, it just turns on and off at preset times with no visible results. I might get frustrated with it if I were using the outlet for our vacuum cleaner at odd hours, but there are other outlets, and I could turn on the outlet manually. During the Christmas season, though, this smart outlet has a very special task. I plug our tree lights into it. At first, I thought I’d have it simply turn these lights on and off in the morning and at night, but that soon changed.
We’ve all heard that we shouldn’t leave our tree lights on when we’re not home, right? And how many times have we been away and wondered whether we’d remembered to turn off the tree lights? So my outlet now turns on in the morning and off at night — a very standard sort of setup. However, it also turns off when the last person leaves the house, and it turns on again when any of us arrives home. We don’t have the worry of wondering whether we’ve turned the lights off, and we come home to a cheery Christmas tree.
I know that a timer will turn things on and off on a schedule, but the advantage of the smart outlets is that they react to situations other than simply what time it happens to be.