Makes life easy, but has a few issues
Update, Oct 2024: The motion sensor is still very sensitive but it turned out the problem with the timer was my error. I'd set up a rule to turn the light off after 10 minutes but elsewhere in the app I'd set it to turn off if it didn't detect motion for 1 minute. So after 1 minute of me being out of sight of the motion detector it turned itself off, as I'd instructed it to. So a good slap of my own forehead here, a very loud "D'oh!" in my best Homer Simpson voice, and I'm restoring the fifth star to the product. Update, Aug 2024: The motion sensor is very sensitive. I've got mine set to the lowest setting and it activates when I'm 10 feet away in an adjacent room. It would be nice to be able to set it to be much less sensitive, so it activates if I walk past it but not if I walk somewhere in the general vicinity. It's as if the angle of view is fairly narrow, so that if I'm walking along the wall where it's located it doesn't respond until I walk right in front of it, but if I'm in the next room it will activate with me a clear 10 feet or more away. That's tedious, because it means if I stand at my bench to mend something the pantry light keeps turning on. There's also an issue that might be with the switch and might be with the Kasa app (I suspect the app, but the two go together). Because I'm prone to forget to turn off the pantry light (and sometimes it's hard to turn it off if I've got both hands full) I set up a rule in the software that activates when the light is turned on, and turns it off 10 minutes later. 10 minutes is plenty of time to find what I need in the pantry and leave, except that it actually turns off after more like 2-3 minutes. These aren't major issues but are irritating enough to knock off a star. There's not much point having time-based options if what happens bears so little resemblance to what I programmed, and it's been known for years that motion sensors that activate whenever anything happens remotely near them are of limited use. I still plan to install the other one in the attic, I'll just leave it to a standard rule to turn it off. Original review: I fitted a motion sensor switch to the room in my basement where I keep the chest freezer. When I take stuff down to the chest freezer I need to figure how to turn the light on, which can be tricky when I've got both hands full with stuff to go in the chest freezer. I can flick a switch with an elbow but it's a bit of a drag. And sometimes when I leave the room I forget to turn the light off, and find it still turned on a couple of days later when I'm next down there. A switch like this solves all these problems at once. The motion sensor means all I have to do is walk past it and the lights come on. And being a smart switch it means I can set up a rule that turns the light off again after 15 minutes. As a fallback I have a "scene" set up in the Kasa app that turns all the automated lights off at midnight regardless, so if the rule doesn't work as expected it will still shut off at midnight. Be aware these switches are quite deep. I had to replace the back box to fit it, because the previous switch I had was the smallest switch available. The metal back box that was in place was deep enough to hold the Kasa switch but didn't have enough free space to handle the cables in and out and the wire nuts behind the switch. But now I have a deeper back box and a switch that works very nicely. Installing the switch is about as easy as it gets. It has four wire tails - a white one to connect to neutral, a green one to connect to earth, and two black ones to connect to line/load. All you have to do is figure which wire is which, use the supplied wire nuts to join the wires together, and configure the switch. If you can't figure out electrics as simple as this, pay an electrician to do it for you. The default level of sensitivity had the light triggering if I went anywhere near it, so I turned it to the lowest sensitivity (this is done in the Kasa app) and now I have to walk right up to it before it activates. That's perfect for my needs, I don't want it turning on unless I actually go into the room where it is installed. As a smart switch it can be configured to activate only when ambient light is low, it has different levels of sensitivity for the motion sensor, and it can be controlled remotely and programmed to turn on and off at particular times. That sort of thing has obvious uses if you're going to be away for a few days, you can set up timers so it's not so obvious you're not home. You can also do all sorts of weird and wonderful things if you're so inclined, so if it takes your fancy you can set it up so that if you walk into the room where the switch is installed it will some totally unrelated device on or off. Why you'd want to turn the attic power strip off when you walk into a room in the basement is another matter, but you can if you want to. I have two of these, and I'm thinking a motion switch to turn the attic light on might be a handy thing to have, for similar reasons. Read more
