Smart-home technology has gotten so cheap that you don’t necessarily need to buy smart things anymore. Sometimes you just need a $6.50 plug.
I recently bought a four-pack of Amazon Basics smart plugs for $25.99.
That’s about $6.50 per plug.
Smart plugs themselves aren’t particularly exciting technology anymore. I’ve been using them for years. I remember buying Belkin Wemo plugs when something like this could cost around $40 for a single plug.
They were useful then, too.
What’s changed isn’t really what a smart plug can do.
What’s changed is how little you have to care about the decision to buy one.
At $40, you buy a smart plug because you’ve decided you have something important enough to justify a $40 smart plug.
At $6.50, you can buy four of them and leave them on your shelf until you think of something else you’d like to make smart.
That’s exactly what I’ve done.
Your Fan Doesn’t Need to Be Smart
One of my favorite uses for these plugs is a fan.
You can certainly buy a smart fan. It can have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and an app and maybe a display and all sorts of other features.
Or you can buy a perfectly good $15 fan and plug it into a $6.50 smart plug.
Now you have a smart fan for a little over $20.
If you’re in bed and you’re hot, turn it on. If you wake up cold, turn it off. You don’t have to get up. You don’t have to reach behind furniture looking for a switch.
The fan doesn’t know any of this is happening.
It’s still a dumb $15 fan.
The plug is doing all the thinking.
The same thing works with lamps and plenty of other simple electrical devices. You don’t necessarily need to replace perfectly good things with expensive smart versions of those things.
Sometimes you can just make the outlet smart.
We’ve Made Laziness Remarkably Affordable
And I mean lazy in the best possible way.
A huge amount of technological progress has been about eliminating tiny inconveniences.
We decided walking across the room to change the television channel was too much work, so the remote control became standard.
Then apparently reaching for the remote became too much work, so now we can talk to the television.
Turning on a lamp or a fan isn’t difficult.
But if technology can eliminate one more tiny inconvenience for $6.50, I’m perfectly willing to let it.
And once the price gets this low, you start finding uses that probably wouldn’t have justified buying a smart device on their own.
That’s what makes cheap smart plugs interesting to me.
A Cheap Way to Control Things From Anywhere
There’s another advantage that goes beyond avoiding the terrible burden of getting out of bed to turn on a fan.
You don’t have to be anywhere near the plug.
I sometimes need to keep an eye on a property when I’m not there. I can check the temperature remotely with a smart thermostat. If it’s a hot, humid day, I can turn fans on remotely to keep air moving. I can turn lights on before I arrive.
None of those fans or lamps need to be sophisticated.
They’re just ordinary devices plugged into smart outlets.
That’s an enormous amount of remote control for very little money.
What About Alexa, Google and Siri?
The Amazon Basics plugs I bought are designed for the Amazon Alexa ecosystem.
If you’re already using Alexa, that makes them an obvious choice. If you don’t particularly care about voice assistants and you’re perfectly happy opening the Alexa app to control an outlet, that works too.
If you’re committed exclusively to Google Home or Apple’s Home ecosystem, you’ll want a plug designed to work with those systems instead.
And even those have become remarkably inexpensive.
For comparison, I found a four-pack of Wyze smart plugs for about $44 that supports Alexa and Google Assistant. That’s around $11 per plug rather than $6.50.
Still pretty cheap.
The Amazon Basics plugs just happen to hit that ridiculous price point where I don’t feel like I need to have a specific use in mind before buying them.
Four Smart Plugs, Waiting for a Job
That’s probably the best indication of how much the economics of this technology have changed.
I have four smart plugs sitting on my shelf.
I’ve already added them to my Amazon account. When I find another use for one, I don’t have to research anything, order anything or turn it into a project.
I grab one.
Maybe I buy another $15 lamp. Maybe there’s another fan I want to control. Maybe I think of something I haven’t thought of yet.
Plug it in.
Now it’s smart.
There was a time when making an ordinary household device remotely controllable felt like home automation.
At $6.50, it’s starting to feel more like an extension cord.
And I’m perfectly happy with a world where we’re getting that lazy.