Smart home products are growing but take-up is still not massive, which is a rather interesting phenomenon given Singapore’s smart city status. Having reviewed so many smart home products, I have to say that they are indeed not for everyone. After so many years, the usability is still not as easy, and there is some setup and cross-product configuration required. For instance, when would you want an electrical appliance to start or stop? What is the trigger event?
D-Link, being one of the well-known home networking and surveillance camera brands, has offered several smart home devices that complement one another. I have reviewed their conventional routers, mesh routers, IP cameras. In this article, I will be sharing my experience on the DSP-W115 Smart Plug.
The smart plug, like most other brands, work as a remote switch where you can power on or off any electrical appliance connected to the plug. To do that, you need to install the mydlink app which is D-Link’s app for many other smart home enabled devices, like the IP camera or sensor. After following the in-app steps to pair the Smart Plug to the home Wi-Fi (802.11n), you can start setting up the “smart” events.
On the smart plug, there is a button to manually switch on the connected appliance. There is another WPS button to pair to routers with WPS button. There is also LED around the face to indicate the smart plug status: during initial bootup, the LED shows red, and once it’s up, it shows green. The LED can be disabled via a button at the side of the smart plug.
From the app, the most straightforward way to operate the smart plug is to tap the icon, which will simply turn on or turn off the connected appliance. Another way is to configure a schedule to turn on and off at preset times, which I did for the review. I connected the smart plug to a display cabinet and set it to light up at 7pm and turn off at 10pm.
If you have smart assistant like Google Home and Amazon Alexa, you can also use voice commands to control the smart plug. So, I could ask Google Home to turn off all lights, and then the smart plug will turn off together with other smart lights like Philips Hue. If you have other compatible smart home devices like sensor, you can trigger automated actions to the smart plug, for instance, when the sensor detects movement, turn on smart plug power.
Verdict
The D-Link DSP-W115 smart plug is a companion to your D-Link Smart Home product range. On its own, the smart plug works with Google and Amazon smart assistant without mydlink app, as well as IFTTT. Do take note of the size of the smart plug (95 x 74 x 38 mm) and make sure there is ample space around the existing wall socket to plug it.
Retail price: S$39
Official product website: https://www.dlink.com.sg/product/my-dlink-wifi-smart-plug/
