How do you connect smart plugs to the internet?
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Hi there! Thanks for asking - Iâve not actually done this myself but I did find this, I hope it helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DouCWcgWwoQ
Weâve got a Tapo camera so the process looks pretty similar so I hope this works.
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Allow a few hours for poking around on this; it isnât as quick and easy to do the first one as some vendors seem to say.
Procedure seems to require that the vendor (Tapo) must have a keep-alive between their cloud on the internet and your device before it will allow anything to go on your home network. It seems that you can ask yourself âif Gadaffi used one of these in a secret weapons enrichment machine in a hidden cavern somewhere, could it work?â and if the answer would be âYesâ then there will be some nuissance or other to stop it from working. Many home automation tasks are not enriching weapons-grade materials, but the Chinese vendor Tapo were quite careful just in case.
Before you can start, you need a Tapo app on a smart phone, to pair your smart plugs to your home network. I got one for Android free from the google store. Before it will work, you have to create username and password and reply to their email. Worthwhile planning ahead what are going to be your passwords and so on. Different vendors use different proprietary apps. The detail of which menu and smartphone buttonpress works does vary with different vendor apps, but common to all is that you go back to your phonesâ Settingsâ (gear icon) and make sure that it is on the wifi of your home broadband (may need the wifi password of the sticker on the broadband hub).
Back to the Tapo app on your smartphone, you need to âpair a deviceâ. I found it useful to search online for instructions on the other computer with a proper keyboard and a bigger screen.
I got several P110 smart plugs onto my home network by their wifi this way.
As an example of todaysâ power records received to home assistant on a raspberry pi using the wifi connection, I attach screen dump from home assistant as seen from another raspberry pi. The blue smart plug was not in use today. The red and yellow chart Watts from a small solar panel with inverter and a larger solar panel with a different inverter. Weather today has been mostly cloudy with sunny moments getting up to 320 Watts from yellow and 160 Watts from red, which was in a shadow near 15:00. Chart shows that under todaysâ bright cloudy intervals, both solar panels today were generating about 1/4 of their best. Home assistant can retrieve a lot of other info from these Tapo smart plugs, after you have enabled âAdd-onsâ installed and configured a vendor-specific Integration for Tapo and enabled a hidden option on your smartphone Tapo app.
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Sorry to be the one to ask the daft question, but what actually are smart plugs and what are they used for?
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The phrase âsmart plugâ gets used to mean a particular combination of a mains three pin plug and a mains three pin socket connected by a wirelessy remote-controlled relay, also with calibrated volts amps and power metering (rms 5 seconds averaged) and also with all the networking equipment codes and a device unique id sufficiently long that hackers would take a lot more than three guesses and never find it. Iâm not sure why they called it âsmartâ.
You donât have to use it like a chart recorder as I did above; If you had a <13 Amp extension running your home office workplace, this smart plug also meters the total kWh, which you might be able to note as a business expense.
The Smart Plug can also contain everything which you need for an Automation in your Home Assistant or other software to message the remote switching over your home wifi, for example to switch on a fan heater while your software has noticed an hour with cheapest electricity price. [caution. some other smart plug brands have a small flimsy relay which can only switch small things]
without Home Assistant, you may alternatively use the vendor-specific app on your mobile tablet or phone to show you many of the same things, and that has a button for remote control of each âsmart plugâ from your 4G or later phone. You could switch on your christmas tree lights remotely from your office.
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Super answer @whyMore 
. It always feels like smart plugs sound like one of those things that other people use - your practical examples are brilliant (and thanks for asking the essential question @greenwellys!)
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