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Comment by dsab | Hacker News Reader

Guys what are your favourite smart plug? I need one with easy integration with grafana, not sucking, and shipment to EU country?

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I'm a huge fan of https://www.shelly.com/ - they have a built in webserver and can be controlled via POST requests. No cloud needed.

I also like their products very much. I installed a few of them in my sockets. Some people argue that it's not safe to put in your sockets walls and the 16A limit is realistically lower before they can overheat and cause fire. That scared me a little bit but I think most of the reports are from bad wiring like using thin wires or not tightening the clamps enough

I have a Shelly pro 1PM in my Breaker box for the car charger. It gets to 80 degrees Celsius easily at 16A. I have two other gripes with it:

1: the slots/clamps are small which makes fitting 4mm2 wires a chore already. 6mm3 is impossible. 2: the overcurrent protection is very trigger happy. Due to solar panels in the street that voltage can vary significantly. Apparently the charger doesn’t always keep up exactly resulting in a current of 16.0001A which is more than the limit of 16 and poof, off it goes. Not sure whether this is an actual fault in the charger or some rounding error.

Big +1 for Shelly stuff. IIRC it was started by a hobbyist who got annoyed at the crap from Aliexpress and decided to do it properly.

And that they have done.

I've been happy with my tplink sockets, especially running them off-cloud, and getting some command line control over them (although I think that debug api got blocked on later firmware updates). But quite easy to feed data into any db once you have such control.

Just about to try some ikea zigbee sockets, seem cheap(7e) in comparison. I hope I can also get them working command line based, just trying to setup a sonoff usb stick with some python package (bellows) as we speak.

ATHOM plugs are very nice, you can order one with ESPHome or Tasomata firmware preinstalled and they can ship from Germany https://www.athom.tech/

Note this vendor is different than the Athom company making the Homey smart hub: https://homey.app/

I had four tasmota preflashed athom plugs die on me in less than a year. As long as they worked they were perfect but they don't last... Hope they addressed the issue meanwhile

Were you switching high loads? I've had a few for some years with no issues

They were always on, used them as power monitors. One on my washing machine, one on the 3d printer, one on the tumble dryer. One on and off depending on the season, christmas tree and similar.. They all died the same way, at some point never turned on again without any apparent reason.

ZigBee list of good devices:

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/

I have two plugs in use that ship to EU (at least NL) and are made (or at least certified) in the EU. The latter matters to me because of fire hazards etc (e.g. [1]). Both can handle 16A and connect over zigbee which helps to reduce idle power consumption. 1. Innr plugs, e.g. SP240 https://www.innr.com/en/product/innr-smart-plug-eu-with-powe... 2. Robb zigbee smart plug https://www.robbshop.nl/robb-smarrt-slimme-stekker-zigbee-36...

[1] https://hackaday.com/2023/11/03/just-how-dodgy-are-cheap-usb...

I use Gosund SP112. Available at Amazon, ~12€ / plug. Flashable with Tasmota or ESPHome (I use the later). It can switch the mains as well as one USB-A power outlet.

You need to open it to flash it the 1st time.

There's at least one unused accessible GPIO. On one I soldered an DS18x20 temperature sensor. Now it controls the heating in my shed based on the measured temperature stay above zero degrees in the winter.

I love these ATORCH ones on Amazon, they have a screen with a bunch of useful details, super stable wifi connection, over-voltage/current/power protection, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BGSYJQK6/

I've switched from Shelly plugs to ThirdReality Zigbee outlets, I like having them on Zigbee rather than WiFi as I've installed like 8 now, and my consumer WiFi router doesn't like handling more than 15-20 devices.

The Shelly plugs suck so much. So slow.

I've been using a few of these on various devices https://www.mylocalbytes.com/products/smart-plug-pm

I’ve got some Sengled E1C-NB7 plugs that I really like. The form factor is nice, they work perfectly with Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant, and they’ve got a power button on the device itself.

I want to buy more and they don’t seem to be available anymore.

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