Belkin’s upgraded WeMo Insight Switch can now tell you how much your appliances are costing you to run, making it a great cornerstone of the WeMo experience, although if all you need are raw power numbers, you can do the same thing much more cheaply.
The WeMo Insight is, essentially, the fusion of two products that Belkin’s previously offered. As the WeMo name implies, it’s part of Belkin’s WeMo family of home automation products, although the name is a little misleading, because it’s basically a plug, rather than a straight switch as you might find on a wall or something. You’ll have to take that one up with Belkin’s marketing department. Then again, Belkin already sells a straight plug as the WeMo Switch, and that’s what the Insight Switch is the mutant cousin of.
It’s also an update to the Insight line of power meters that Belkin’s sold on and off for a number of years now — for example, the Belkin Conserve Insight which I reviewed for Geekspeak all the way back in 2011. The WeMo Insight Switch takes the Insight technology, the WeMo Switch, throws them into a blender and chucks the remaining plug bits into a box for you to use.
What you end up with is a rather chunky plug, which means it doesn’t play all that well on a powerboard unless the sockets are very generously spaced apart.
As with all things WeMo, installation is a fairly painless affair. It’s a plug. You plug it in. If that’s too taxing for you, maybe you should have a lie down and get someone else to install it.
Once it’s plugged in, the Belkin WeMo Insight Switch sets itself up as an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network, which means it’s time to once again jump into Belkin’s WeMo app.
The WeMo app is the brains of the WeMo system, which covers a range of devices from actual wall switches that require an electrician to install to LED lights, which I reviewed here. The WeMo app guides you through setting up the WeMo Insight Switch by connecting to your actual Wi-Fi network, as well as naming it and setting up any rules you might like to use with it. As with anything else WeMo related, you can also switch the plug on or off from within the app, which is presumably where the Belkin marketing department got the name idea from.
It’s fair to say that I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Belkin’s WeMo app. It’s intelligent enough, and it’s not difficult to set up rules, name different WeMo devices as you add them, or integrate rules from IF (AKA the service formerly known as IFTTT) as you come up with new automation ideas.
The issue that I’ve long had with the WeMo app is that it can be a little capricious when it comes to actually detecting WeMo devices in an established network. Right at the moment the WeMo Insight Switch is the only bit of WeMo gear I’m actually using — a long story involving a tree and a storm is to blame for that one — and I still had a few instances where the WeMo app simply didn’t “see” the WeMo Insight Switch. An app refresh tended to fix the problem, and my experience suggests that the WeMo experience comes and goes depending on your tablet or handset of choice and the state of app upgrades at a given point in time. It is annoying, however, that Belkin steadfastly refuses to implement a WeMo desktop interface. It’s smartphone or tablet only for iOS or Android devices.
Or at least the number of the power. Which isn’t anywhere near as catchy as a song lyric.
The added feature that you get with the WeMo Insight Switch in the WeMo interface is power consumption, which depends on you importing your actual power charges into the app. It then calculates based on the current draw to give you daily and estimated monthly figures. Depending on your power setup these could be a little rubbery, as you may have peak and off-peak rates, or solar to deal with, but the data is in itself quite instructive.
I used the WeMo Insight Switch to check the power draw of the Dyson Hot+Cool Jet Focus AM09 but it could equally be placed behind your home entertainment unit to give you a running estimate of your monthly entertainment spend. When you do apply these kinds of figures to your household usage, it becomes a lot easier to work out where you can switch devices off to save power, or which devices are particularly energy-sapping.
The concept of power meters are nothing new, and if all you want is a baseline count, any decent electronics store will sell you one for about $20-$30.
The Belkin WeMo Insight Switch’s RRP is $99.95. That’s going to be problematic for some, unless you’re integrating it into an existing WeMo setup. The premium for the Insight functionality is $30 over the top of the straight WeMo Switch, and in that context it’s perfectly fine value. It’s certainly more convenient than a straight power switch variant, because you can check power usage from anywhere you’ve got an Internet connection, but if you were implementing only the Belkin WeMo Insight Switch and nothing else in the WeMo family, you’re paying a fairly stiff premium for the privilege.