Dabbling with Home Automation

TL;DR

Kasa smart plugs and light switches work well and are very affordable. If you are curious about home automation, you can experiment with little effort and at a cost of $15-$100. The plugs are super-simple, the light-switches require very basic electrical wiring competency.

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I've begun dabbling with home automation, mostly for lighting. I have purchased the Kasa EP25 smart plugs (4 for $40) and Kasa Smart light switches (<$30) that are well-reviewed by Wirecutter.

One of the light switches is motion-sensitive. I'm still fine-tuning it, but seems to work well. In hindsight, I would say if you think there is any possibility you want motion-detection, get it, because it doesn't cost much more, and you can turn it off if you don't want it.

Setup of the smart plugs was reasonably easy. The hardest thing is the fact that they only operate on 2.4 Ghz wifi, and require the setup device (smartphone) to be on the same band. Since phones will generally default to 5.0 Ghz, this requires going into your router control panel (not hard, but you may not remember how to access it or the password), and temporarily turning off 5.0 Ghz (don't forget to turn it back on).

Installation of the switches was not hard, and I rarely do electrical work. There is one gotcha, which is the volume of the plug is>> than a dumb plug, and you may have a hard time jamming it all back in the box.  I'm sure a pro could manage it, perhaps by trimming excess ground and neutral, but I wasn't up for that. After some searching, I came up with a pretty good work-around: these $5 box extenders.

The Kasa app is pretty good, and the plugs, though not the switches, are HomeKit-compatible.

My #1 need was to provide good & reliable wall-switch illumination of rooms that didn't have overhead lighting. Each room had the typical (1) switch-controlled outlet. So that takes care of one light, and doesn't require any smart stuff to work as expected. That was important, I don't want an over-complicated home where a guest can't turn on a light without installing an app. Then the other lights in the room are connected to a smart plug, which is triggered to go on with the smart switch. All works well, albeit with a ~3-second latency of the additional light to go on.

I also automated the fan in our bedroom that provides "white noise". It is on the floor in the corner, and my aging back dislikes stooping to turn it on and off. So I put it on a timer that corresponds to bedtime + 1 hour.

Similarly, I have a foot-warming carpet in my office that I also have to stoop to turn on. And that I sometimes forget to turn off. So I hooked that up to a smart plug, and put a turn-off schedule for the end of my workday, in case I forget.

Our Christmas tree lights are also very inconvenient to reach, so those also went on a timer (though given they are LED, I think the energy savings is negligible). On that note, these plugs include energy monitors. It is mildly interesting to see how much energy different appliances consume.

Last, I have a Corsi-Rosenthal fan setup in the basement, where the cat lives. I like to run that a couple of hours a day, not for cooling but for filtering. That was easy to put on a schedule

So that's it for implementation experience so far. In the process, I did quite a bit of research--much more than was needed for my relatively straightforward use cases--so I will document that next.