Wemo Insight WiFi Enabled Smart Plug, with Energy Monitoring, Works with Alexa (Discontinued by Manufacturer - Newer Version Available)

I bought this because I have an Amazon Echo. Upon further research, this was the one that worked best for me because I liked that it had more recipes that worked in conjunction with Echo on IFTTT than other current brands. Heres what I noticed: Its not too suited to control a light/lamp. You know why? If youre walking around in the middle of the night and your Wemo Insight Switch is located somewhere near your feet where your light is plugged into, youre going to have to feel around for the Wemos switch. Even with Echo, its inconvenient because if you dont want to wake everyone up by calling to Echo, youre going to have to feel for that Wemo switch in the dark or take your phone literally EVERYWHERE with you so you can turn on the light with your phone. Now, what if your wifi goes down? If your Wemo Insight Switch is somewhere quite out of reach, youre going to have to really reach for it - so if youre in the dark... lol. My recommendation is to use this on other things that you may want to control power with. Its feature is that it keeps track of how much time you use on it and how much wattage is used. Im not very creative, so I dont know what that leaves for you to use this Wemo Insight Switch with. lol. However, if you dont know how to install a Wemo Light Switch on your wall or if your house is fitted with 3-way light switches instead of single-poles, this (and others like this) is really the only alternative for you. Dont get me wrong though. There is nothing wrong with the Wemo Insight Switch. In fact, its amazing! I love how convenient it is. Once I find other things (besides my light) I can use this with, Ill be able to track the power wattage used, set when to automatically turn it on or off (like when Im on vacation and need to set it for the cats or just to make it look like Im home), or just move it around and use it with different appliances simply by plugging and unplugging it. If youre using this with Echo, theres an additional feature now (accessible from Echos app) - you can set it to turn your appliances/light on or off when it detects you leaving and arriving home! It does this with your phones location services. Pretty neat, huh? Loving my semi-automated home more and more. :)

Some reviews do not give this product the justice it deserves. I was cautious about buying this switch based on the issues experienced by some, but I am happy to say I am satisfied with my purchase. In fact, I bought 4 of these switches for various lamps throughout my home and plan to buy 4 more. They were easy to setup and I have a few simple rules setup in the app for lamps to turn on and off at various times. The ability to turn the switch on and off when I am not home is a nice as well. Some advice: When you initially setup after opening the box, each individual switch will most likely want to update the firmware. I recommend that you dont do the update when the app prompts you to after the initial install until you have all switches plugged in and recognized by the app. When I setup my first switch I acknowledged the update immediately and it took forever. Thinking there may have been an issue, I turned the switch off and then back on. All seemed okay and the update was successful. After I setup my rules, I ran the update which seemed to work pretty quick, but it turned all my switches off and I had to go back into the app to turn back on. The rules feature is kind of confusing, but if you play around with the the features or consult the Belkin website for troubleshooting it becomes easy to setup rules when certain switches turn on or off. It seems like you cannot personalize each switch; rather you will need to apply a specific rule to one or more of your switches. In this case, you may have multiple rules. The ability to remove a switch from a rule seems confusing. Being unsure if a lamp was removed properly, I just deleted and re-created the rule with the lamp I wanted. I gave this a 4 star rating because overall, its a great product and does what I needed it to do, but I think Belkin can do better with the app and making it more user friendly.

I bought this switch because the Wemo line was discounted for a day on Amazon. It works fairly well - sometimes the action is delayed. Setting it up was easy enough and pairing it with IFTTT has added some neat features. But the energy features of this switch (which make it cost $10 more than the regular switch) are worthless eye candy. Save yourself some money and by the Wemo Switch. Better still, buy the SmartThings Know & Control Your Home kit - better, quicker, more reliable. *** Also... *** This switch often doesnt have the same third party capabilities as the regular Wemo Switch. For example, if you use SmartThings, they support every product EXCEPT the Wemo Insight Switch with their app development environment (SmartThings Labs). Additionally, the recipes at IFTTT for the regular switch far outnumber the recipes for the Wemo Insight Switch.

I use this to control lighting in my home. It was very easy to hook up (less than 5 minutes) and it works as advertised. I like how it detects the exact time of sunset in my area and turns on the lamp at that time. Very cool. I havent had to reset it yet. I try to stay on top of the software updates in order to keep things working correctly - there have been two updates in the past two months. Takes about 6-7 minutes to update. The app is free and very easy to navigate from my iphone and my ipad. The power consumption feature isnt all that useful to me but it is a nice extra. Overall, this is a product that works as advertised and makes my life easier. I recommend it. (I have four of them now - all working well).

The switch basically does what its supposed to however Ive run into several bugs in the Android app that make me question its design and long term usability. For example, when you go to change the default cost of a kWh, the app makes you use a set of four wheels to enter the value rather than just having you type it into a box using the keyboard. Also, when I saved the new value of $0.098, saved, and went back into the settings, the value displayed as $9.8 even though the calculations based off that value were still correct. That said, Ive been running around the house plugging all kinds of things into the Insight Switch to see how much power theyre using and its been a lot of fun to see where I can get the best energy savings by putting devices into standby or turning them off entirely. Ultimately the switch will end up on a dehumidifier in the basement and programmed to only turn on at night when no one will be disturbed by the noise it makes. Integration with IFTTT.com makes this a desirable item although I have a feeling that someone will come along and be able to make a better one. I would give the item an additional star if there was a sufficient web interface to control the product similar to the Nest or Dropcam however I have yet to find one other than using the aforementioned IFTTT. All in all I can recommend this product to anyone looking to tinker with and automate their home appliances but there are probably better options for a lot of use cases that are cheaper and easier to use.

It works good, just a couple things I dont like. 1) Setup was easy, I had the switch working in about two minutes with iPhone. 2) Does not give feedback. In other words, if iPhone A turns on the switch, no indication is shown on iPhone B. The same is true if the switch is manually operated. ( Feedback is given on another iPhone IF you tap on a circular arrow, then it will update the status. However, the status is not pushed to you as it is with SmartThings. ) 3) No instructions provided if you want to control your switches with more than one iPhone. Digging through the Internet, I found the simple answer. After installing the WeMo app on the second iPhone, simply put that iPhone on the same HOME network that you used when you originally set up WeMo with the first iPhone. Following the installation instructions that you did originally doesnt work. The second iPhone will not find the WeMo WiFi. Had they included this bit of information with their instructions it would have saved me about an hour of online digging. Their competitors, TP-LINK, has you create an account. By utilizing an account system it is not necessary to bring each iPhone onto the same home network for set up purposes. You simply download the app, enter your login credentials, and youre done. This could be a distinct advantage if you are 1000 miles away from home and find that you have to buy a new iPhone. ( Overall, I like the WeMo better than TP-LINK. ) Normally, when I set up home control systems I prefer to use SmartThings for controlling purposes, utilizing Z-Wave switches. Because Z-Wave uses an entirely different frequency, this can avoid interference, and, clogging up Wi-Fi networks. Another advantage of Z-Wave is that each device acts as a repeater, so if you have several Z-Wave devices, they can be located far from the hub. If your needs are simple, WeMo is a good choice.

I purchased a WeMo switch on its own some time ago and six months ago Costco had a deal on a Belkin Netcam HD+ with WeMo switch. Ive actually went the route of plugging the Netcams into the WeMo switch so I could time when the cameras were functional during the day. (ie: out of the house then house cameras turn on. Garage camera shuts off for a minute daily to reset) In addition to this I did install a WeMo light switch to control some porch lights. Belkin definitely has issues with their firmware updates. At times the device will seem like its completely blown away. When this has happened Ive just left it sit out of frustration and have come back to it an hour later, it was fine at that point. Other times Ive had to reset at which point sometimes it signs back onto my network and wants to do the firmware update again like nothing happened and other times (though less and less frequently now) Ive had to completely reconfigure the switch. I have not messed with motion detection on the cameras ... But Im thinking about doing that soon for the garage. Motion in the garage == lights on in garage :) IFTTT integration can be a little iffy .... Ill explain below The additional Wemo switch I have I wasnt sure what to do with so I plugged it into our washer/dryer combo to see when it turns off and send a notification. That seems to work well .... If youre having the notification done through the WeMo app. If you link that through IFTTT youll get that notification about an hour later. Since our washing machine drains into a washing tub there are times where that will overflow. I plan to get a moisture sensor at some point set to cut off power to the washing machine wemo switch if it detects an overflow. Looks like Belkin isnt planning on offering one that I can see so it would need to be something else tied to IFTTT. Something like that I would trust the IFTTT integration to handle even with a 10-60 second delay. The switch that controls porch lights controls an outlet and works perfectly for that. Theres also a light fixture that I stuck a Philips Hue bulb in. I set it up so when the switch is tapped it would tell IFTTT to turn the bulb on to a specific brightness and color and when the switch is tapped off it would turn that light off. That works well with about a 10-20 second delay which I find reasonable considering the trip the command has to take. All in all Im mostly happy and will be adding more WeMo devices to our home for various purposes.

I have 2 switches and then bought this when it was on sale. I like it. Put a heater on it but I made sure the amp and watt draw is within the Belkin Limits. Easy to set up just like my two switches. One thing is that it blocks another plug hole on my power strip so now I have to move things around when I want to use it. I wanted to use it with a heater but the heater has a stay off function after power loss, which is good. Ill just have to use it with a dumb fan for the summer. Im moving to a place with better cold insulation anyways. This will be useful in the summer though when I can run the fan while I sleep so I dont bake overnight.

IT TURNS ITSELF ON RANDOMLY. How could that *possibly* be acceptable in a product that controls electric power? I have it hooked up to a couple of track lights -- 200 watts in total. No rules or anything -- just wanted to be able to control the lights with my Amazon Echo, which can talk to the WeMo. I went away on a three-week vacation and the cable internet went down in my apartment shortly after I left. I came home to find the lights on -- turns out the WeMo had turned them on and left them burning the whole three weeks. (It had nothing to do with the Echo, which wasnt even plugged in at the time.) The WeMo conveniently tracks how long its on and how many KWH have been used, so I could see that $20 or more of electricity was down the drain. Initially I thought it might have something to do with losing internet connectivity -- not that that would have been acceptable in any way -- but since then Ive discovered that the WeMo randomly turns on *for no reason at all.* It was doing it every few days in recent weeks -- extremely annoying, and I should have just taken it and thrown it in the trash, but instead I looked up wemo turns on randomly, found lots of other people with the same problem, and tried some of the suggestions others had, e.g. resetting it, moving it further away and closer to the WiFi access point, et cetera, ad nauseam. I even tried disconnecting the network for a few days, but the WeMo still turned itself on, proving beyond a doubt that the problem was within the switch itself (i.e. with the network disconnected no one could be sending rogue commands to turn it on or off). For a while I thought Id solved the issue by moving the switch to a different outlet, so I made the mistake of leaving the WeMo plugged in. Unfortunately I got called away from home and havent been able to go home for a week. Im currently sitting here, 200 miles away, watching on my surveillance camera as the WeMo goes ABSOLUTELY BONKERS. It turns on randomly every few minutes if I do nothing. Sometimes it turns itself off. Sometimes I try turning it off remotely with the WeMo app and it turns on, then off, then on again, then off again, then on again in a rapid cycle. No matter what I do, it always ends up on most of the time. There seems to be NO WAY for me to fix this or disable it -- I am stuck watching helplessly as the lights go on no matter what I do. The neighbors must think Ive gone crazy, with my lights flashing randomly and burning all night long. Thank God its only the lights. I had some silly notion of hooking up a WeMo to my window air conditioner (would be nice to turn on the AC an hour before I get home on a sweltering day) but I cant imagine how screwed Id be now if I had done that. The WeMo is a thoroughly untrustworthy, even dangerous piece of junk (imagine the problems that could be caused by a switch that randomly turns itself on or off) and Belkin is irresponsible to continue selling it.

I have a total of 4 Insight switches. I had to send one back for a replacement because it would not connect to the wifi (Amazon was great about the replacement). I love being able to switch my lights on and off by either using the app or Alexa. Now to the reason I took one star away. The set up. These devices are finicky and the two issues seem to be the router/modem and the firmware update. My old router didnt seem to want to work with these. The wifi signal was poor and that may have contributed to the problem. I would get device not detected a lot which was frustrating. Finally, after numerous complaints to my internet provider (Comcast) I received a new router. I had to go back to each device and reset it to the new router (a challenge but it can be done, just google the steps). Once that was done new firmware needed to be downloaded to each device. Again I would get device not detected on one or two devices so what I ended up doing was downloading the new firmware not only when I had the WeMo app open using the wifi but also when I turned the wifi off and downloaded via my phones LTE. I have no idea why but this seemed to fix the problem. Now all the switches work so Im happy.