The cheapest thing in my smart home does more work than everything else combined

Published Aug 4, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT Jasmine is Software and PC Hardware Author at XDA with years of tech reporting experience ranging from AI chatbots right down to gaming hardware, she's covered just about everything. Whether it's breaking news about the latest AMD NPUs or creating video tutorials on social media platforms, Jasmine has contributed to the world of AI and tech in a variety of ways including interviewing the CEO of Razer, AMD's Director of Product Marketing and the VP of Lenovo. Passionate about gaming and PC technology, she has built countless computers, keyboards and other peripherals - knowing them inside and out. Getting into smart home technology can be expensive. Just ask any enthusiast. Whether it's $200 flagship thermostats, $150 smart door locks, $80 multiprotocol hubs, or countless RGB light bulbs that tend to add up and hurt your wallet. However, I still think the best piece of smart home kit I've picked up is actually the cheapest and least glamorous bit of silicon on my network: a generic $10 smart plug. Flashy devices get the marketing spotlight, but this humble device sits quietly and can act as the backbone of your entire automation ecosystem. You don't need expensive smart appliances to build an elite smart home. A simple $10 smart plug with energy monitoring capabilities can handle more operational heavy lifting, like automating legacy dumb hardware, enforcing power management, and driving a local home assistant automation, than all of your expensive ecosystem hubs combined. Smart plugs can automate just about anything Your old appliances can be a part of your smart home Wemo smart plug has come to its end of life support with Belkin.Wemo smart plug has come to its end of life support with Belkin. One of the best benefits of investing in cheap smart plugs is the ability to turn your legacy appliances into smart appliances. Realistically, investing in smart versions of common household appliances can be pricey and may also shorten the device's overall lifespan, giving dumb appliances a direct advantage. You never have to worry about a company ending support for your fridge's smart features if you're relying on a smart plug to make it smart instead. Older non-smart appliances like mechanical coffee makers, dehumidifiers, window AC units, and space heaters are great for this because they also have hard physical toggle switches that stay on when power is cut and restored from your smart plug. Using a smart plug lets you instantly automate all the appliances you already have at home without spending too much. By plugging a mechanical appliance into a cheap smart plug, you're instantly converting that legacy hardware into an automated node without needing proprietary vendor apps or cloud subscriptions. Energy-monitoring feels essential Go from simple On/Off to actual state tracking The SwitchBot Hub 3 (R) is an excellent example of a smart hub that is useful within your smart home, provided you have other devices in the SwitchBot ecosystem. So what's the actual benefit of investing in an energy-monitoring smart plug over a standard one? This is because it allows you to trigger more advanced automations. It can go beyond the standard on-and-off automations. Most power-monitoring silicon lets you measure watts, volts, and amps in real time. Energy monitoring transforms a single plug into a non-invasive state sensor: as you monitor the power draw, it can indicate the current state of your appliance, too. For example, with a washing machine, the plug detects when its power draw drops from 400W to under 2W for two minutes. It then recognizes that this lower power draw indicates the cycle is complete and, in turn, can fire a local TTS announcement saying "Laundry is done" across your smart speakers. Another example is using it with your TV or PC to detect the state. When a smart plug senses that a media center, TV, or PC is drawing over 80 W, it can automatically dim the living room by dimming bias lighting and trigger movie mode. Using an energy-monitoring plug can also help you eliminate that ghost power draw. You can cut phantom loads, like vampire power draw from gaming consoles and legacy receivers, which can, in turn, save you electricity over the course of the year. Smart plugs can also help out your home too From network rebooting down to a healing mesh For those who want to take their smart home systems to the next level, you can even use smart plugs for things like hardware self-healing and network infrastructure. If you're opting for a locally controlled smart plug, then you can use it as an auto-rebooter for your router. An advanced home lab trick is to plug your ISP modem, or even a secondary access point, into a smart plug that runs a local ping check script. Then, if your local Wi-Fi loses internet connectivity, the smart plug can automatically power-cycle the modem to try to restore service without any manual intervention. The next time your internet goes down, you don't have to fumble to your router. It should restart itself. A great feature of line-powered smart plugs, especially Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Thread variants, is that they also act as permanent, always-on routing nodes or repeaters. This can strengthen the wireless mesh backbone for weak battery-powered door and motion sensors across your home. You don't always need the flashiest tech The simple devices can sometimes be the best Sometimes the best smart home tech isn't the most expensive or the most feature-bloated. It's actually the cheap tech that you don't think about often because it gets out of your way and quietly executes utility tasks reliably 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You don't need to even think about it once it's set up. It's so easy, as a smart home enthusiast, to pay for bloated smart gadgets because they look and seem fascinating, but I've quickly realized it's significantly cheaper to invest in a pack of smart plugs with energy monitoring to turn all my current dumb devices into smart home tech. Kasa Matter Smart Plug w/ Energy Monitoring Kasa smart plugs give you the ability to monitor the energy of all of your devices and allows you to include them in your smart home.