Wemo Smart Plug with Thread review: An affordable & fast HomeKit outlet

AppleInsider

Wemo's latest HomeKit smart plug carries a small price tag but boasts Thread connectivity for rapid response times and excellent home coverage.

The new Wemo Smart Plug with Thread

At CES 2022, Belkin made a few HomeKit announcements. It revealed its Wemo Smart Video Doorbell that hit the market not long after, and it announced that it would be bringing Thread to many of its Wemo devices later this year.

It started the Thread rollout by upgrading the Wemo Stage that shipped with the requisite radio. In our review, we revealed how much faster the device was with Thread enabled.

Belkin has released the first of several hardware refreshes that come with Thread from the onset -- the Wemo Smart Plug.

Same design, by design

Understandably, the new Wemo Smart Plug looks just like the last model. It is still very compact, with a physical power button located on the side. It's slim enough so that two smart plugs can fit at once in a standard wall receptacle.

Controlling the Wemo Smart Plug

One side has the HomeKit pairing sticker, though it can be added to the Apple smart home platform via NFC. Just bring your phone near during setup, and the security code will be transmitted wirelessly.

Otherwise, this is a small, unassuming smart plug that you can use with Apple HomeKit to control anything that plugs into the outlet. That includes lights, fans, coffee makers, and more.

Wemo Smart Plug in the Home app

It can be controlled via the Home app, with your voice, or with automations based on a schedule or the behavior of other accessories. All firmware updates are performed through the Home app, one of the few accessories to do this without needing a third-party app.

Upgraded with Thread

The big news here is that the Wemo Smart Plug joins the growing list of Thread-enabled products. Thread is an emerging connectivity standard to rival Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and others.

It creates a low-latency mesh network within your home that can self-heal and requires very little power. For low-power devices, Thread is an ideal solution.

When you set up the Wemo Smart Plug, it onboards like any other HomeKit accessory. Add it to the Home app, and it will automatically go about searching for your home's Thread network. If found, it will join.

The Wemo Smart Plug can act as a Thread router. This means it will extend your mesh network rather than merely acting as an endpoint like most battery-powered devices.

To use a Thread network with HomeKit, you do need to have a Thread border router, which includes HomePod mini or the latest Apple TV 4K. These bridge your Thread network with your home's network.

Wemo on our Thread network

When setting up the Wemo Smart Plug with Thread, it took a couple of hours for the device to fully discover the network and join. This was visible inside the free Eve app that allows you to see all the Thread devices in your home.

For those who don't use Thread, Wemo will fall back to Bluetooth, which is much slower in our experience.

In our time testing the Wemo Smart Plug, Thread is what allows this device to react incredibly quickly. Opening the Home app shows the plug's status almost instantly, and any time we control the switch, it's just as fast.

Thanks to Thread, the new Wemo Smart Plug is by far one of the fastest, most reliable outlets we've ever tested.

Should you buy the new Wemo Smart Plug?

While the options for HomeKit smart plugs are robust, there are only two available options for Thread-enabled ones. Belkin joins Eve in offering this new connectivity option, though Belkin carries a much lower price tag.

Coming in at only $25, it's $15 less than the Eve Energy that supports Thread. Eve Energy is more robust, with the ability to track your energy consumption, but Wemo is the more affordable choice for users.

Wemo Smart Plug

Between the small size, small price, and new-found Thread support, the Belkin Wemo Smart Plug is an excellent choice for starting or expanding your smart home.

Pros

• Very affordable


• Compact size can be stacked


• Quick NFC setup


• Exclusive support for HomeKit


• Thread support including as a router


• Software updates are performed through Home app

Cons

• No energy monitoring

Rating: 5 out of 5

Where to buy

You can find the Wemo Smart Plug with Thread up for preorder from Belkin for $24.99.

Read on AppleInsider

mike1

Have a house full of Wemo outlets so I picked up this to give it a shot and begin to add Thread network products around the house,

Set up was a breeze. Other than my Apple TVs and HomePods, this is my first device with Thread, so I am anxious to see how this will improve reliability and responsiveness.

Since it was my first Thread item, I purposely picked an outlet that was close to a HomePod Mini but further from the WiFi router to see how it worked in the Home app. So far, so good.

Not sure exactly why Thread devices can't be seen in the Wemo app. Sometimes the outlets would lose contact with the Home app,but work fine in the Wemo app. We'll see how this is in that regard.

Japhey

This is also available right now at the Apple Store. No need to preorder, get it by tomorrow. 

22july2013

Japhey said:

This is also available right now at the Apple Store. No need to preorder, get it by tomorrow. 

Thanks. But only the US Apple Store.

dewme

mike1 said:

Have a house full of Wemo outlets so I picked up this to give it a shot and begin to add Thread network products around the house,

Set up was a breeze. Other than my Apple TVs and HomePods, this is my first device with Thread, so I am anxious to see how this will improve reliability and responsiveness.

Since it was my first Thread item, I purposely picked an outlet that was close to a HomePod Mini but further from the WiFi router to see how it worked in the Home app. So far, so good.

Not sure exactly why Thread devices can't be seen in the Wemo app. Sometimes the outlets would lose contact with the Home app,but work fine in the Wemo app. We'll see how this is in that regard.

I was having similar issues with a Wemo smart plug losing connectivity with Alexa every so often, like maybe once a month. It turned out that the device was being proxied by another device, which in my case was an Amazon Echo Show 5. Once I removed this odd indirection the device became much more responsive and I've experienced zero disconnects.

I found the configuration issue in the Alexa app, which showed "Connected Via" as the Echo device rather than Wemo. It's like Alexa thought the plug connection and device namespace was being proxied through the Echo device rather than directly to the Wemo device. I suppose the Home hub could behave in a similar manner which may be why the Wemo device isn't showing up in the Wemo app. In my case, when I removed the device from Alexa and re-paired it via the Wemo app before I let Alexa know about the Wemo device everything has been good.

I'm assuming the Home application has a way to aggregate the device namespaces from other vendor-specific namespaces, like Wemo and Kasa, into the Home application's namespace so those devices are directly addressable within the Home app and Siri and ideally without losing connection to their native device maangement apps. My Kasa devices have never had any issues. At least in my Alexa case, somehow Alexa integrated the Wemo device directly into its own namespace and it lost the Wemo namespace reference. Not sure why it would suddenly stop working, but perhaps an OTA firmware update somewhere in the path would change something that broke the namespace reference to the network connection. 

AppleZulu

I bought into Wemo early, before they had HomeKit compatibility. They promised they would, then later (after I’d purchased a number of devices) said no, they wouldn’t, then reversed again and issued a bridge device. I bought the bridge, and also later some more plugs and switches that were ostensibly HomeKit native. 

The most consistent thing about them is that they were inconsistent. Everything would work fine for a while, then devices would inexplicably start reporting back as ‘not responding’ in HomeKit. Sometimes they’d also fail to respond in the Wemo app, sometimes not. 

I eventually upgraded to eero mesh routers and was sure that would solve these problems, assuming it was weakness in signal coverage, or maybe the number of devices overwhelming the previous Airport routers. That fixed it, until it didn’t. More flakiness, requiring frequent running around the house rebooting Wemo devices to get them all back online. 

Then, a couple of weeks ago, a total Wemo failure revealed there’s also an external server system operated by Wemo that is somehow required for functionality. First, why? Second, never mind. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve removed and replaced every Wemo device with a second-generation Leviton device. So far, everything is now stable. I no longer open the home app only to have to wait for an ‘updating’ message on all the Wemo devices, hoping they’ll all still be online. 

So far with Leviton, I can ask Siri to carry out multi device scenes and get an instant ‘done’ response, where with Wemo in the mix, there would be a pause, sometimes followed by ‘done,’ sometimes instead by ‘some devices are not responding.’ 

All that’s to say, I wouldn’t recommend Wemo. They’re not reliable, and don’t produce the ‘it just works’ experience. Based on a couple of comments up-thread, my experience is probably not unique. 

6transistor_2_iphone

Best practice is to set your WiFi access point radios to a fixed channel instead of Auto so the WiFi channel doesn't change thus disconnecting the Wemos and they have to go in search of the new channel.  Especially in areas of congestion and interference where the channels may frequently change in Auto mode.