And ZigBee bulbs are expensive!

Five years ago, feeling flush with cash, I replaced all the bulbs with a mixture of Hue and Innr Smart bulbs. Last week, two of the bulbs died. No explosions or release of magic smoke - they just became unresponsive and I lack the skills to fix complex electronics.

So I looked at some replacements. Hue bulbs are £31 per pair - that's about 15x more expensive than buying a regular bulb. The cheaper Innr bulbs are about a tenner each. Still a bit much.

What about non-branded ZigBee lights? On eBay I found a single GU10 for £8 and, if I was prepared to buy in bulk, £60 for 10.

That's getting better - but still a premium on a boring non-smart bulb.

So I went looking for a Shenzhen special on AliExpress - and hit the jackpot!

There, I found a ZigBee GU10 bulb for £4! The price seems to fluctuate between £3 and £5 - but there are plenty of sellers with close-to-identical products priced less than a fiver.

The bulb took a few days to arrive from China. I plugged it in, searched for it in the Hue app, and it was added. Less than a minute later I was able to bark "Alexa! Turn on the kitchen lights!" - it responded at the same time as all its brethren. It is also colour changeable - unlike the Hue and Innr models.

The labelling says it is by eWeLink and, as expected, it has warm white and colour changing LEDs. Total power of 5 Watts.

But that's not all! AliExpress will quite often plunge price certain items to entice you to become a customer. I picked up another bulb for 77p! It was limited to one per customer - but that was good enough for me!

My sub-quid bulb arrived and… Yeah, identical to the first. Plugged in, paired quickly, turned into a disco bulb with a couple of taps. Oh, and because shipping on the 2nd bulb was delayed, I got a £1 voucher. So, I guess, technically it was free? So I bought another.

Here's what they look like in situ:

They do a range of RGB colours - and will also do white at a variety of shades. They dim. They react quickly. They're cheap.

Will these bulbs last as long as the others? Considering the price, I'm not sure I care! If you buy from a UK store on eBay, there's probably slightly more chance of recompense if things do go wrong. But if you're happy to wait for delivery from China - those cheap AliExpress bulbs are probably fine.

So, there you go. For a couple of quid, you can get a generic colour-changing ZigBee light which is compatible with Philips Hue.

FAQ

juST use A ligHTswiTch

Our kitchen is big. The lightswitches are far away. Also, I don't want them covered with cake-batter when I'm cooking.

gEt a sMarT LIGhtSWItCh

Most UK homes don't have a neutral wire to the switch. That makes it hard to use smart-switches. The ones which work without neutral don't work with dimmable bulbs.

WhAt AbOuT ThE carbon FOotprINt Of shipping?

Even a regular bulb would have been shipped from far away.

PRIVaCY AnD secuRItY is iMpORtAnt

Yes it is. ZigBee bulbs don't have a way to "phone home" and are relatively resistant to being hacked.

The only problem is - I don't know how long the rice will take to cook. It uses "Fuzzy Logic" to work out exactly how much heat and time is needed for perfect fluffy rice. This is inconvenient. I cannot always hear the beep the machine makes when it completes its culinary wizardry.

So let's hook it up to the Internet of Things!!!

Step 1 - Get an Energy Monitoring Smart Plug. These are now relatively cheap and reliable. As the cooker is cooking, it reports back its energy use. But where does it report to? You can use the associated app, but that doesn't have an alert to say when something has stopped drawing power.

Step 2 - Install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. HA is a nifty bit of software which gives you complete control of your SmartHome. It integrates with all the various makes and models of devices you have controlling your lights, TV, plugs, smoke alarms, and other gadgets. It comes with a companion app which runs on your phone.

Step 3 - After spending a few weeks configuring everything, getting frustrated, wiping everything, starting again, and then getting it right this time - you're ready to add some automation! I used Leo Fabri's Appliance Status Monitor. You tell it which plug you want to monitor, what power level to detect as "on", what power level to detect as "off", and how long it should be off before sending you an alert.

The user interface is... intimidating.

It is necessarily complex. But this definitely isn't for the casual user!

Step 4 - Test with users. My rice cooker dips in power a few times through its cooking cycle - which sent my wife scurrying to the kitchen expecting to be fed. After which, I eventually worked out that I needed to tell the monitor to wait for the power to have dropped for at least 60 seconds before sending an alert.

Step 5 - It works!

One minute after the end of the cooking cycle, I receive an alert on my phone. I can now go and eat. Lovely!

Is this worth it?

I like playing with gadgets - so yes.

I also don't want to eat over-cooked curry, or under-done rice - so also yes.

I am lazy and don't want to get off my arse every five minutes to check the cooker - so again yes.

I don't want my rice-cooker sending all my rice-cooking habits back to the manufacturer - so even more yes.

This is a fun project for adding a minimal amount of smart-alerting to your existing appliances.

And… it works!

Mostly

These are the Meross 315 Smart Plugs. They are small(ish), cheap(ish), and easy(ish) to use.

As soon as I plugged them in, before even configuring them, my home went crazy. I got a pop-up on my phone asking if I wanted to control them with Google Home.

Nope!

I then immediately got an email from Amazon saying our Echo had detected the device and perhaps I wanted to use that to control the plugs?

Also nope!

I wanted to add the plugs using the Meross app. Not because it is particularly good (it's basically fine) - but because of a couple of limitations in Matter. Here's a page from the plugs' manual.

At the moment, Matter doesn't support firmware updates. That's probably fair. You don't want some random app bricking your device - so it is restricted to the manufacturer's app.

But Matter also doesn't support energy monitoring. I understand it's early days for the protocol, but that's a bit annoying.

Luckily, HomeAssistant came to the rescue! Because the Meross API is well documented, my local SmartHome Pi was able to get a realtime view of how much power was flowing through the plug.

Minor irritations

The power toggle - and activity LED - is on the left side of the plug. That makes it a little awkward to press and obscures the view of the LED. I guess putting it on top would make it too easy to accidentally activate?

The energy monitoring doesn't seem to update in realtime in the app.

I renamed the plug in the Android app, but that name doesn't seem to be exposed in Matter. Nor was it picked up by HomeAssistant.

In order to connect the device to WiFi, your phone needs to be on that specific WiFi network. Because the devices only support 2.4GHz, I needed to swap SSIDs on my phone. But, on the plus side, I didn't have to manually enter any passwords.

But these are all fairly minor complaints.

Verdict

For about £32 for a two-pack (depending on whether the algorithm favours you) these are pretty good value for money. They were easy to set up, quick to get working in other apps, and had a firmware update waiting for me.

I got some Meross plugs about 6 years ago and they've kept trucking all that time - so I'm pretty confident these will last. And, even if Meross disappears, Matter means that another app can easily control them.

Next Steps

Here's the plan. I'm going to plug this into my Tumble Dryer and tell HomeAssistant to monitor its energy usage and send me a message when the drying is done.