4 ms·
You can just do little things. I bought some WeMo smart outlets that plug in to regular sockets- basically a WiFi lamp timer. They have been a pleasant upgrade
by ip26 7y ago
You can just do little things. I bought some WeMo smart outlets that plug in to regular sockets- basically a WiFi lamp timer. They have been a pleasant upgrade to old fashioned dial lamp timers, easier to change the schedule, trigger with sunrise/sunset, etc. You can combine them with all sorts of appliances. For example, I'm always irked how much idle power my garage door opener draws. Well, I could throw a smart switch inline to shut it off at night, and in the event of late night door usage I can override the schedule with my phone.
If they were to fail or EoL, I'd be out some money but all you have to do is unplug them.
- weberc2 7y agoI do the same, but I do worry about the security aspect. I don’t like the idea of having a bunch of devices on my network. I put the IoT things on a guest network, but I still feel iffy about it. I’m sure there are better solutions, but all of them seem to require flashing your router with DDWRT and doing fancy networking things that I don’t understand well, and frankly I don’t want to put the effort in.
- Scoundreller 7y ago> how much idle power my garage door opener draws How much does it draw? Standard Chamberlain or something exotic?
- ip26 7y agoI do believe it's a Whisper drive Chamberlain, I measured it somewhere around 15W around the clock. $10/year or so. You might think I'm just unlucky, but it turns out most of them are like that.