Is your Electricity under control? We try GOSUND Smart Plugs

If your trying to keep an eye on your power consumption there’s lots of ways to do it, but I like to make things do more than one job and that’s where Smart Plugs come in.

We’re quite fortunate at the minute with Smart plug prices having fallen considerably from their high average prices of around £40 – £50 each a couple of years ago, to much more affordable prices today of around £8 – £10 each, there hasn’t been a better time to invest in these great wee devices.

In the End for us, the Gosund products seemed to be good value, they look good, don’t take up much space, have the best reviews, a Free App with Energy monitoring and they also working with all the Smart Speakers.

Don’t be fooled by the cheaper copies though. If you look around you’ll see a lot of similar / identical looking products to the Gosund Smart plugs, but after some research we found quite a few negative reviews about these renamed copies, so we avoided them and chose Gosund’s round smart plug multi packs instead.

By the way, this Post is NOT Sponsored. We’re just telling you our experience with these smart plugs.

Gosund Energy Monitoring provided by the free App, with live usage and Day / Month tracking

Prices

After comparing models and options, we opted for their 4 packs that sold for just £34.99 or £8.50 each socket (at the time of writing this post) and waited patiently for their arrival by downloading and registering the Free Gosund App on our devices ready for setup. (This saves time later)

Connecting to Wifi

24hrs later our package arrived and we got ready to connect them all to our Wifi Network.

Having read the reviews we were already aware that these sockets need to use the 2.4ghz frequency on your wifi, so I logged in to our router and switched the wifi to separate bands (it gets switched back after we finish installing).

The router then puts out both 2.5ghz & 5ghz channels independently, which makes connecting these plugs to the wifi easy.

QUICK TIP; grab a marker and number your sockets between the pins in our case we bought 12 so we numbered them 1-12. This will make things easier for you later if you swap things around.

Now its time to get them connected. first make sure your connected the your home network and then open up the Gosund App. (I’m presuming you’ve already set the app up at this point.)

At the top right you’ll see a green dot with a plus symbol, click this and you’ll be taken to their product adding page.

Select “Socket Wifi” and you’ll be taken to the Wifi page which should be showing your home network. Select the correct wifi and enter your password (once you’ve done this once the app will remember these details for everytime you add a new device.

Now Plug your No1 numbered Smart Socket into a wall socket or extension socket and check to see if the light is blinking.

Confirm that in the app and click next and you’ll see the app searching for your device.

Once its connected you can then edit the name to that of the device you plan on plugging into this socket for example, Lamp, TV, Kettle, Washer Dryer etc, whatever you plan on using it for and then add the number of your socket.

You should now have a socket added in the list on your app for example ” Living Room Lamp (1)”, ” Living Room TV (2)” and so on. This way if you swap things around later you’ll always know which socket you plan on swapping and where it is in the app.

And that’s it, you just do this with all the other sockets you have, even if you don’t plan on using them just yet, the nice thing is the app will remember your wifi now, making the setup of each new device quicker, and it’ll save you having to switch your router settings again.

Once your finished swap your router back to the original auto frequency setting and that’s your wifi setup done.

Energy Monitoring

*Image 2* – selected plug power monitor screen over each month

*Image 3* – selected plug power monitor screen over each day with graph.

Now your up and running, we can get to the electricity control.

Once plugged in and setup, each device starts monitoring and recording the electricity flowing through it. This is great for keeping an eye on your electricity usage and it also helps you to reduce waste by programming your devices to turn off directly from the plug when you don’t need them, for example at night.

If you look at our screenshots above you can see in image 1 that all your devices are listed in the home page, simply selecting a device from this list takes you to another screen (image 2) where you’ll now see your monthly electricity usage over time (depending on when you connected your plug for the first time). Select a month from this second screen and you’ll be taken to another screen (image 3) where you will then be able to scroll through day by day within the month you selected to compare your usage daily.

Now you have the figures, what can you do with them?

Firstly the data is going to show you which devices are using power and when they use it day by day, but what about hour by hour? Well that’s sadly not recorded, but what you can do is look at these devices live throughout the day & night (image2) to see how much power they use.

This is handy for seeing what each device uses on standby, and while each device might only use small amounts of electricity by themselves when in standby, it’s the total throughout your home that makes a difference.

For example how many plugged in charger sockets are currently on in your home? You’ve got phones, laptops, PC’s, TV’s, Dishwashers, Washing Machines etc etc, all using just a little or quite a lot of power on standby and your not even using them. Even if this only amounted to 50p per day, thats £15.00 per month or £180.00 per year extra!

So now we know which devices are costing us more money on standby, we can set up groups and switch them all off at night or until we need them. We can also use our smart speakers to switch them off for us.

Of course if you don’t use a smart speaker you can still control these devices using the Gosund App so you always have control.

Conclusion 8 Weeks in

Well it’s been 8 weeks, and we’ve been using 12 of these smart plugs all over our home, controlling and monitoring everything from lamps to washing machines and TV’s and they’ve been great. Everyday the first person up says “Morning Alexa” and all the pre programmed smart plugs and other smart home devices switch on (she also reads the news and weather for us too), then at night we say “Night Alexa” and everything that is setup to do so switches off, saving us paying for electric that we aren’t actually using.

So all in all the Gosund Smart Plugs do exactly what they say on the tin. They’re small, well made, smart looking devices that make monitoring your power usage around the house really easy and they remotely control your sockets too. I particularly like that some thought has gone into making these fit side by side in a standard twin socket or multi socket, which makes them far more practical than others that are on the market.

So if you like saving money, and are looking to help save energy wastage, these are great little tools to help you do just that. 5 Stars from me.

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