Smart Plug, Works with Alexa, White

Think of it as an internet-connected mains plug. Plug anything you like into it, and you can switch it on or off from anywhere in the world, using the app. Simple, but a really powerful concept. You could switch a light on or off to pretend you are at home, turn on a heater half an hour before you get back on a cold night, or schedule it to boil a kettle first thing in the morning.

The plug is 13amp so should be suitable for any home appliance you care to connect.

You can also link it to Amazon Alexa or Google Home, if you use one of those services. Then you can control it by voice as well.

A small annoyance is that it requires a 2.4 GHz wifi connection. Most wifi access points still provide this, but 5 GHz is taking over so a bit of a shame.

How does it work though? From the user perspective, it’s pretty simple. You install an app for Android or Apple iOS, register with Woox, plug in the device, run the app and enter your wifi password. This enables the device to connect to your wifi network.

Who is Woox though? This matters, because when you set up the device it registers with a cloud service. Even though you have a firewall on your home network, the cloud service will still be able to communicate with the device because it makes an outbound connection, which most firewalls allow by default. This keeps a connection alive, so that when you are sitting in a hotel room and run your app, the app communicates with the cloud service, the cloud service communicates with your plug, and it turns on or off.

This does mean that Woox now has access to your home network, so it is critical that you trust Woox to keep it secure. There have been cases (not with Woox as far as I know) of systems like this being easily cracked by third-parties, giving them access to your network as well.

I verified this by looking at my firewall logs. The Wook smart plug makes a connection to a server on an EU region of Amazon Web Services every 3 seconds, regular as clockwork. The bandwidth consumed is very small so don’t worry about that.

I couldn’t find out much about Woox except that it is a new company (summer 2018) and describes itself as having “Marketing center in Spain, R&D center in Shenzhen, China and its Logistics, Distribution and Service center in The Netherlands.”

The reason it has brought the plug to market so quickly is that Woox has badged a product from Tuya Smart, a Chinese company which provides both the product and the cloud services.

Personally I would prefer to have the service provided by a European company simply because the EU is better regulated. But I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything insecure about Tuya Smart. Just that you are trusting them with access to your home network and should be aware of that. Tuya Smart does say it is GDPR compliant which is some reassurance.

Security is a big deal, and it annoys me that products like this make no mention of the issue but just ask you to accept the “magic” of a plug you can operate from anywhere

Amazon UK buys links：https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07MMTHS9X