Smartplugs that work with Alexa and Google Assistant are a commodity so smart buyers look for additional features like how much they hog up a two-plug outlet or what other capabilities they may have. Tech expert Dave Taylor of https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/ checked out two of the latest wifi smartplugs from TopGreener that feature energy monitoring and found them a great addition to any smart home.
Check them out on Amazon:
Round unit: https://amzn.to/2LE7nL5
Rectangular unit: https://amzn.to/2LFELB5
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Smart plugs that can monitor your energy usage? Let's check it out
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Dave Taylor here and I'm looking at these. These are both from Top Greener
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They're smart Wi-Fi plugs and they include energy monitoring. Now the energy monitoring is the really cool part because let's face it
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Wi-Fi smart plugs that work with Alexa and Google Assistant There's sort of a dime a dozen now. Unfortunately they're not quite that inexpensive but
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there are a lot of different options. It is definitely a commodity
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But add energy monitoring and you have a cool addition. Now as you can see Top Greener has quite a few different choices and these
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there's two very different shapes here. Now let's just plug them in and start
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playing with them. So I've already configured them and I actually found the configuration to be super fast and super easy
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but part of that might be that I've just done this so many times at this point
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But I had no issues. I've read on Amazon some people complained it took them half
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an hour to get their units to be seen. A lot of times in my experience that issue is something to do with actually
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your Wi-Fi network so you've got to use a 2.4 gigahertz so if you have
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only 5 gigahertz running a lot of smart devices have a really hard time with that
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So make sure your Wi-Fi network and your base station are set up for multiple frequencies
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and it should work a lot better. Now let's see I called this one rounder
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ingeniously and this one got it square. I know it's rectangular we're going to run with that. So Alexa
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turn on rounder. Alexa turn on square. So there's that most basic functionality and now if we go into the app
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so as with all of these you have to get a specific app for the brand of smart plug
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and then you actually have a skill that you also integrate into the
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Alexa app on your smartphone and then together those actually give you the information
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and the ability for them to all work together. So now I can see that these
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little holiday lights are drawing a fairly measly 39 watts. That is very very energy efficient
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So to make this more interesting I have a kettle, an electric kettle. These things draw a ton of power
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So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go ahead and record the screen
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so that you will be able to watch and see what happens in the app when
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I actually plug in the kettle and turn it on. So first off we're going to unplug this
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and we'll just use square for this because why not So let's get the kettle wire
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and these just basically make your water boil quickly by just pushing a whole lot of power into it
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So the outlet is on and I would know that because there's actually a small blue light
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here too. Let me turn it sideways so you can see. So that blue indicates that it is actually on versus off
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and I'm going to go into statistics and in statistics you ready we're gonna
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it's right at 0 now because it's not drawing any power at all
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which is good to know. When it's off it doesn't draw even the minimum amount of power
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but then there's a little flap on the back that I push down
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and now watch what happens to the power usage. So now we're going up to 1200
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watts of power and what is that 11 amps of juice. That's a lot going on here. So this will actually boil the water
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and as it does that this will actually be keeping track of it
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and not only that but I don't have much in the way of today's energy use yet but
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it will actually calculate on a daily basis and then over months it will actually give you that data. So if you have some devices or
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appliances that you suspect eat a lot of your power bill one of these can be a great solution for that
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and I'm going to go ahead and turn this off because I don't actually want to boil water
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right here go figure and then I'm going to turn off the recording so
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we're good there and there's really not much else I can demo
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I like these I like the design here's a couple of inset photos of how they fit
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into a two plug outlet so you can see in both cases you can use the other plug
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though with the round one it requires being on the bottom one for that to be
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the case and in fact we can just unplug it and you'll see why because the prongs are on the top of it
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they're not square in the center which is smart right so it minimizes the
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overlap with the top plug but this is not really a design that's going to let
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you plug two of them in simultaneously whereas if I can unplug it this one
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not lose the power strip this one very much is designed so that you can plug two of them into the same outlet
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which is not a bad idea and the other thing while I'm holding them is that
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they both have on off switches so if for some reason your Wi-Fi goes down or
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something you have that manual override which I think is really important with
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smart plugs otherwise you could really kind of be stuck and let's see what else
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can I tell you so the app that you use for these is Top Greener
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ingeniously enough and the skill that you use for Alexa or for Google
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Assistant is called you guessed it Top Greener and they are fire resistant
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UL listed FCC compliant they have a temperature operating range of 32 to 104
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degrees so they're not at all rated for outdoor use or for in like a super cold
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space but 32 degrees if your house is 32 degrees you have many other bigger much
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bigger issues than whether your smart plugs gonna work so don't use this for
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your space heater and then wait till it gets to 32 degrees to turn it on that
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would be a bad idea and they don't have much in the way of power range so it's
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120 volts 60 Hertz that's what it wants and in terms of the actual maximum amps
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you can pull through this I couldn't find that number so if that's really important to you you might actually email Top Greener before you acquire any
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of these and that's really all I got other than the price but before we get
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to the price if I can ask can you go ahead and subscribe to my channel really
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appreciate it and let me know what are you using for smart plugs and how are
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they working out for you because they're such a commodity that people have very
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mixed experiences some of these really really inexpensive ones work great and
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other ones really hard to pair or they're flaky I find that for the most
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part all the ones in our house and office work really well there's one
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that's a little problematic and I'm suspecting one of these might actually replace it and it's great because in the app in the Top Greener app itself you
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can rename these as many times as you want I like to give them functional
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names so I have for example party lights in my house who wouldn't have party
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lights in their house right and I have couch light and I have bedroom lamp and
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I have floor lamp I just give them nice logical names because to me that makes
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it easier to remember you can do other things my daughter and her room has
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fairy lights how sweet is that it's nice right so she walks in her room and she
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says turn on fairy lights and boom our whole room looks very magical it's very
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nice maybe I should do that hmm well that's a whole nother topic anyway let's
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talk about pricing because unfortunately these are not quite yet released so this
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one is the square unit and it is $15.99 okay it's it's the rectangular unit I
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call it square and it is $15.99 at amazon.com the round one I couldn't find
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a price it's not quite yet on the market but I'm imagining it's the same price so
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we'll also call this $15.99 at amazon.com and go and check out the pricing
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because these are commodity products the price goes up and down so pay attention
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and I gotta say I like these these are perfectly functional Wi-Fi smart plugs
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but their real killer feature is that energy monitoring which is great if you
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want to get a better handle on how your house or your office uses energy these
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are your solution because you don't even have to tell anyone they just run and
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then after a couple of weeks you go into the app and you look and you see of all
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the different smart plugs I have which ones actually using the most energy then
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you can go back to that employee and say you need a different monitor your monitors out of control or you can say holy cow I had no idea our microwave was
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drawing so much power on our house both of those are very common problems anyway
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that's all I got I'm gonna go plug these in so this is Dave Taylor and I will
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catch you in my next video
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