I was so hyped about this low cost effective smart plug and was looking forward to putting it to the test and see how well it performed. I’ve had it for a few days and I can’t say how much I’ve been disappointed. Now, this could be sheer luck, where I have an advanced prototype and it’s failing or this could be what the production version shipping out to people will be, but in either case, I don’t know. If you continue reading beyond this point I’ll tell you exactly what my experience with this product has been.
This is by far the most affordable of the smart plug you can find on the market to automate, lamps, coffee maker, sound system coming in at $25 USD for 2 on Indiegogo. This allows people to start diving into automating things in their home, apartment, condo or even the connected cottages.
While the device looks solid, the inner working might not be so cool. The first thing you need to know right out of the box is you need a 2.4Ghz WiFi router in your home, being that I converted everything to 5Ghz 5 years ago, this I led me to create a separate 2.4Ghz WiFi wireless access point within my current router as it allows for this type of activity, commonly referred to as a Dual band router. Guess what? You can’t, Dual Band routers aren’t supported, I tried various combination of Dual-Band routers that I have and it wouldn’t even attempt to connect or identify it when doing the setup.
I decided to setup a strictly 2.4Ghz router that doesn’t have 5Ghz (Good thing I still had an old Asus router laying around), I take my phone I connect to this new WiFi I created, I open the app and start the setup process, hold and behold it finds the intelliPLUG and sets it up within seconds! I’m probably screaming like a little girl at this point and I’m happy that this is working. However, the intelliPLUG would never stay “connected” for more than about 10 seconds and then would mark itself OFFLINE. You can still use the intelliPLUG manually, but this defeats the purpose.
A few more hours, a few different routers, setup and testing just to conclude that it just doesn’t work.
I’ve reached out to the company to see if this is something that’s common or if I’m using a prototype VS the actual intelliPLUG that Indiegogo users will be getting, so far I haven’t received any news on the subject. For now, I can’t give this device more than 1-star for the price and the manual use.
