While building smart home you will come to point when you will want to add remote control to device or appliance which does not have smart capabilities. It may be something like desk lamp, fan, monitor or something similar. You can do it with smart plug. The only requirement is needed, that when you plug in desired device to electricity it turned on without requiring pressing its physical button.
There are many options of smart plus in the wild. Some has only on/off possibilities: WeMo, TP-Link, D-Link, iDevices has smart plugs of this kind. Some are smarter and can show you how much electricity the plugged-in device is using. Major manufacturer of smarter plugs are: Elgato, WeMo, Belkin, iHome. But if you look for HomeKit integration, there are smaller number to choose from.
Now I am using Elgato Eve Energy smart plug. It has HomeKit support, energy monitoring and works over Bluetooth.
Setup is very easy, as usual. Just open Elgato Eve app and follow instructions. By the way, Eve app is very good designed and is similar to Apple Home App
Elgato Eve Energy
After setup is complete, you can see basic information about status of the plug: is it on or off, how many power is using plugged in device, projected cost of using this device all year and graph of usage history.
By opening edit mode, you can add new metrics or remove some.
You can add the state of it, Voltage and Current to the screen.
All this fancy information about power consumption, usage history, voltage and current is available only in Eve application. It Apple Home you can see ant control plugs state.
For daily use it is enough to be able to turn on or off the device or to see its state. Using Apple automation, you can for example turn on light at specific time or at sunset. Or to turn off lights when you leave home. More ideas for automation you will find at Automation ideas section (coming soon).
For now, this smart plug I use for dumb LED stripe placed under the bed in master bedroom for ambient lightning.
