I think I’ve seen it all now. What’s an RGB Smart Plug I hear you say? Well, it is just what it sounds like. It’s a smart socket – 3840W (resistive) max with power monitoring – so nothing new there, but they’ve added RGB LEDs inside the socket itself for a novelty.
Banggood’s description goes like this –
The socket looks pretty with it’s RGB lights and it runs off the now standard “Smart Life” App. Personally I’d rather it was programmed with Tasmota for local operation – and I can’t see any easy way to get inside it – but for now let’s go with the flow.
So, it’s a pretty normal looking EU smart socket, at least until it lights up. The internal RGB LEDs are not stunningly bright but good enough for decoration. See screenshots from the Smart Life App, it took me seconds to add the socket – power off, power on, press the on-off button – done.
As for load, I plugged the socket into my kitchen wall and plugged in my kettle which as you can probably see in the image, uses around 2700W. The smart socket power monitoring is handy for loads like this and I can confirm that it got the voltage right..
After boiling the kettle, the Smart Socket was not even luke-warm.
Typical for this kind of device you can set timers and scenes etc…. handy for having the kettle power up when you get out of bed, though I’d rather add that kind of control directly into my Node-Red mobile interface using Tasmota, it is of course easy to use the Smart Life App to turn the kettle on just before getting out of bed so the hot water is ready by the time you get a bathrobe on 🙂
I’m sure there are a ton of more useful applications but for me, having water ready for coffee when I get up is good – and as I often get up in the early hours, the socket RGB lighting is… well, yes, ok.
Looking at that Power monitoring – I have no idea why the big numbering said 0.0 for the daily total after I’d boiled the kettle but everything else seemed ok. 10 minutes later after unplugging the socket from the kitchen and plugging it back in my office the large value above continued to say 0.0 which looks more like a bug in Smart Life than the actual socket.
