Daily Archive: September 25, 2013

Easy and Makes a Huge Difference

I installed the motion sensor by the main door of the house, and as soon as someone steps in, the sensor detects the move and the system automatically triggers a light to switch on.

the light stays on for 5 minutes and off automatically. and the system is only active during evening/night (thanks to the smart rules).

so this is really convenient when I get in the house with my hands full: no need to look for the switch.

I immediately fell in love with it. I have since bought 3 sensors, so now rooms where the wall switch was set to a plug that was not effective turn on the moment you walk in. Setup was easy. I did have trouble with one of them, but it was most likely the cache within the iPhone. To fix this I switched to a different iOS device and it set up very fast. I hope at some point they add wall switches and a way to enter multiple rules within ifttt. It would be great to say if cloudy allow these sensors to work with specific rules. In the current beta of ifttt you are limited to one recipe with just one if and one that. I know you will enjoy this item.

The Belkin WeMo solves those issues and they have a nice, modular look and operation. However, setup was a little more cumbersome than I’d hoped it would be and one of the switches never established contact with my router and so I had to revert to the old fashioned timer at that location. It was only 25-30′ from the router so it was disappointing that it could never be detected but the instructions do say that there could be issues with certain types of routers so it may be necessary to upgrade there.

Overall, good performance and easy to set up the program on my iPhone once connected…

I found the set up to be painless, and I set up two lamps. What I like is that I can set up times for the lamps to go on/off, but I can also turn them on/off from a remote location. If I’m away, I can have the lights go on/off at various times.

I have set up the IFTTT, but not used it yet. It seems that sooner or later I’ll use it.

In general, the things I would want to turn on remotely–say a space heater an hour before I get home–are potentially dangerous when unattended. That said, there are several good uses for this type of device, and if you already have the need this is one good solution. But please, be safe.

Almost like it was “feeling out” my network. But ever since then, it has performed flawlessly with my iPhone. Never gets dropped from my network. Responds within 1-2 seconds, whether at home on the wifi or on a different continent. I can see how it would be a pain to use if you weren’t technologically-inclined, but for the rest of us, use is a cinch.