Gosund Smart Sockets

Peter ScargillGOSUND, Gosund smart sockets12 Comments on Gosund Smart Sockets

Gosund 16A smart sockets with power monitoringA pair of Gosund SP1 16A (i.w. 16 amps) Smart sockets turned up for me today.

These German smart sockets plug into your mains power outlet and allow you to control the output either locally or remotely by a variety of means.

Now, first off the bat these are not as cheap as the Chinese versions, they are made in Germany and at least to Spain I got rapid delivery. I suggest they mean 16Amps non-inductive load – so just as with the Chinese versions I’d be very wary about attaching a 16 amp heater. At 220v I’m thinking a 2KW heater should be fine – but I’ve not tested that yet as it is WAY too hot here in Spain to test any kind of heater.

There is an on-off manual override button on the top…. with a red light – OFF when off, dim RED when ON. I plugged them into the mains one at time after grabbing the Android App “Smart Life” – there is handily a QR code for this on the side of the boxes they come in.

As it happened I already had an account with this APP as I must use it for other stuff but that’s easy.

Next, I tested pushing the on-off button on the sockets – works as expected. Next I tried adding in the sockets to the Smart Life app – doddle.

Next I asked Amazon to find the units by name. It didn’t – then I noted that the “Smart Life” skill is needed for Alexa – the Amazon app on my phone asked for a password to enable the skill – done – dusted. Now Alexa could control the two sockets no problem.

Of course my next course of action was to ponder how Node-Red on my Raspberry Pi could talk to the switches…… normally I would FLASH such switches with Tasmota or ESP-GO – but it hit me that, as my Node-Red installation has Amazon cached speech (via my Amazon AWS  account and MPG123 – I put together a flow in here ages ago) I could have NR talk to Alexa. IT WORKED. Now, you might say “why bother as the sockets have their own time switches” – well, they DO have simple timers, but using my BigTimer on Node-Red, I can do something those simple timers can’t… that is dusk and dawn as well as special include/exclude days and months – in fact, almost anything except make tea.

All  in a very successful day. The GOSUND sockets of course do simple on-off only – but this setup was EASY. I’ve seen somewhere (out of stock) for UK and US plug variations but personally a I travel a lot I’ve settled on the EU standard for sockets and just use adaptors elsewhere (and American plugs are usually a bit nasty anyway) and increasingly we see universal sockets appearing that will handle various standards.

Timing is not, however ALL these units do, power monitoring is another feature and that’s where third party firmware MAY be of interest. Using the Smart Life app you can monitor historical current consumption of whatever is plugged into one of these sockets. If you are happy to read this information on the Smart Life app then you are all set. Exporting said info could mean installing the likes of Tasmota third party firmware – see below and comments.

But first, in case, like me you didn’t immediately twig to how useful this could be… my wife and I have holiday rental cottages back in the UK.  Almost all year around, our air source heating is good enough but in freak weather conditions (of the kind we see more and more of these days) it could be useful to know how much power has been used by guests choosing to use backup electric heating – and even to be able to turn off a (for example) heater that has accidentally been left on. This could equally apply to any house with teenagers who might, while you are away, leave something running…. etc., etc. Or you could be getting a poor memory through age or simple illness, head off on holiday and realise you left something running – the list is endless. That device you left on might have it’s own thermostat but how would you know it actually works without being able to check current consumption? Been there, done that… trust me, this could be useful.

Antonio who gets involved in these projects as I do and who is always keen to help enthusiasts, suggests that there may be an easy way to put “Tasmota” onto these devices if that is of interest but check versions etc. Here’s the link Antonio sent me which also has handy teardown photos.

And for the Smart Switches:

USA:

  1. Pack of 1 – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072ZX8RTZ
  2. Pack of 4 – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079MFTYMV

UK: Amazon links will follow as soon as Gosund respond…

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07NNPBT2Y

Germany:

  1. Pack of 2 – https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0777BWS1P
  2. Pack of 4 – https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07B911Y6V

Note that reference in the comments below to “Tuya-Convert” is no longer valid (I’m writing this at the end of 2022) – that software has been dead for some time. Also note that I CAN use the Gosund sockets in the Smart Life APP but the actual Gosund APP seems to pair the sockets but not actually control them – which seems odd.

12 thoughts on “Gosund Smart Sockets”

  1. Hi Pete,

    Great write up as ever!

    Just wondering if I’m missing a trick, you mention they are 16A but tho only UK ones I can find are 10A

    Cheers,

    Ed

  2. Agree with this. We’re so used to just being able to plug in everything at once in the UK.
    Maximum demand handling is important at our Romanian place, where we only have a 2kW contract and a 16A main fuse.
    Balancing the demand between power tools, hot water, madam’s hair dryer etc, knowing that it’s a 40euro bill and a 24 hr wait for a replacement fuse – I can see these units being useful with some NR rules.

  3. power monitoring use cases: something is working or not: imagine a laundry machine, or a curtain/blinds motor… if you put a socket like this on these devices, you know when the laundry machine has done, as its power consumption falls to about 0W or just a few, the ones the socket itself uses…

    knowing the laundry has finished, you can trigger on the dishwasher machine, without fear of going over your power maximum rate and have you mains blocked from general switch… or if you forget and turn on both, you can instruct them which is more important, and send an OFF signal to the other…

    or when the curtain/blinds motor reached its own endstops… calculating the time between from completely closed to completely open watching the power consumption, and viceversa (they usually are different because going down is easier and faster for the motor, due to gravity force), you can tell Alexa to open blinds to 50%, for example, meaning it has to trigger relay for, let’s say, 17 seconds…

    2. A very good point Mr Shark – maximum power control – that is useful for some guys out here who pay MORE if they go over 5KW at any time.

  4. That site, Tasmota, Peter and Antonio linked is a real eye opener! I had no idea there were so many various sockets, lights etc. available to ‘Tasmotize’. I can see that word being added to the international dictionaries soon. I glanced at the ‘general’ stuff and spotted a very good piece written on the ‘Witty Cloud’ version of an ESP8266. I have a couple of these and the article has inspired me to drag them out of the parts store and use them. In particular was a simple piece of test code to cycle through the IO’s and see what happens.

    1. i use Travis Griggs (digiblurDIY, look at his channel for lots of precious infos, on rules, too for example: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ZdPKE2ckcBhljTc2R_qNA/videos ) method to find gpios when i make templates:

      set device as generic (18)

      set every gpio (except tx and rx, less used, and gpio0, which if found low on boot will cause device to go in programming mode, and you’re screwed…) to a different relay, so gpio2 relay1, gpio4 relay2, etc…

      this way you’ll have a bunch of relays on top of tasmota main screen, and pushing those buttons will trigger actually a real relay, or light up an led, etc…

      then you go in config again, and having noted which relay does what, you alter them putting for example the one you firstly put as relay1 to led1i (leds are quite always inverted on these devices, so that “i”: if you turn them on, they will go off, and viceversa), relay2 is a real relay, so put it as relay1 (usually you don’t have many…), etc

      having got rid of all the basic turn on/off stuff, you start setting the remaining gpios to “button1”, 1 by 1, till you find the one which triggers the relay when you actually press the button…

      numbers are important: if you select relay1, led1i and button1, they’ll be all bound together, no programming needed: if you push the button, relay triggers and led turns on

      and you’re done!
      for the basic devices, of course, for the power monitoring devices i wait for more advanced users to step in…

    2. i tasmotized even a couple of rgb and white wifi lamps using tuya-convert, but you’ll need nodered or homeassistant to manage them with a color wheel, or the likes, as there’s no such thing in actual tasmota web interface, there’s only on/off and 0/255 dimming, no color picker

      of course you don’t need to create your own templates, as on that site you’ll find tons of them already, so just flash tasmota, apply template, and everything will work

  5. I got the same ones and successfully used tuya-convert. The process is a bit unstable, but it worked just fine after a couple of retries.

    1. I tasmotized about 10 devices, of about 7 different types, using tuya-convert and added their templates, made by me, to that site personally 😬
      You just need to flash them and apply that template, which set ups everything, buttons, leds, relays, etc, with the correct gpios and hardware model

      1. all of these are my templates, shared there… there are others, but can’t remember now which one 🙂

        https://blakadder.github.io/templates/alfawise-pe1004.html

        https://blakadder.github.io/templates/bilikay_SP10.html

        https://blakadder.github.io/templates/blitzwolf_SHP6.html

        https://blakadder.github.io/templates/digoo-dg-sp01.html

        https://blakadder.github.io/templates/houzetek_AWP07L.html

        https://blakadder.github.io/templates/emylo_XL9251WI.html

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