MYSTROM WIFI SWITCH – gadget review

Before I decided to purchase the myStrom devices I had been using smart switches from a dutch company called “Plugwise”. At the time they did not offer a mobile app to control / setup the devices but only offered a management software that also only ran on windows. So I had to install a virtual image of Windows on my iMac just to run that particular software.

Even though the Plugwise products work just fine I started to look around for a more flexible solution. After a while I came accross the myStrom line of smart home products. myStrom currently offers the following products:

myStrom smart home products

• myStrom wifi switch
• myStrom bulb
• myStrom LED strip
• myStrom wifi button
• myStrom wifi button +
• myStrom powerline LAN
  
• myStrom mobile app
• myStrom click app (beta)

In this review I am focussing on the myStrom wifi switch – a review of the wifi button + will follow shortly. As I am using Philips HUE products for lighting in my home I have not tried the myStrom bulb nor the LED strips. However the reason why I got the wifi button + was to try to combine both Philips HUE and myStrom worlds as well as my Sonos products – more on that later.

myStrom wifi switch

I have been using 5 wifi switches for at least 2-3 years now. They are currently available only with a swiss or EU compatible plug. It does not look like a US version will be available. They work as advertised and combined with the app provide a handful of useful features.

Main features

• manually turn the switch on and off using a mobile app from anywhere in the world
• turn the switch off or on based on your local sunset / sunrise
• set an individual daily or weekly schedule for each switch
• deactivate a switch if the standby power usage goes below a certain value

Setup

Setup appears to be pretty straight forward and can be done directly through the app. However I did run into a couple of smaller problems during installation:

• Sometimes the switch is not able to connect to the network even though all the settings have been entered correctly
• Sometimes a switch loses connection to the network and then appears as “offline” in the app without an apparent reason

Daily use

I mainly use my wifi switches to remotely turn off a bunch of lamps in our living room where we do not have Philips HUE light bulbs installed. Using the mobile app you can define actions where either all switches or certain groups of switches can be turned on or off with one click.

You can create a “widget” that can reside in your iOS control center so that you can very easily turn all the lights on or off when you’re leaving the house.

Mobile app

The mobile app has a simple user interface. Everything is straight forward and I had no issues finding my way around. It gets updated regularly even though these updates seem to mostly be bug fixes. I have not seen many new features added in a while but I also don’t seem to need them.

They just released a new (beta) “click app” together with the wifi button which I will review shortly.

One thing I do not like is the circular interface for the schedule settings. It does look like an old school schedule timer switch but I find it tedious to use. I’d rather just be able to input the values in a simple list without having to mess with the fiddly and tiny little green dots.

Web interface

myStrom also offers a web interface with a personal login. I have not used this interface a lot as it looks very outdated and is not really intuitive to use. I think most of the functionality can be found in the mobile app anyway. myStrom really should work on this webinterface or get rid of it completely.

Issues

All in all the wifi switches work very well. There are some things that pop up every once in a while though:

• The wifi switches firmware sometimes needs to be updated. The mobile app will let you know that an update is need and you manually need to start these updates for all of your switches. However while this update is happening everything connected to you switches will turn off and on again. This is not a big problem in my case as I have only a bunch of lamps connected to my plugs. If you had something like a TV or a computer connected (myStrom explicitly advises you NOT to connect a PC to these switches) then having the switch suddenly turn off would not be so great.
• Every once in a while a switch will lose connection the network without apparent reason. Unplugging and reconnecting the switch usually corrects this problem very quickly. Still it’s annoying when it happens
• If your wifi is turned off then the switches do not report the power usage. Unfortunately they are not able to save this data and re-send it later to the network. Also if your wifi is turned off or a switch drops off of your wifi network any defined automatic schedules will stop working.

Verdict

I have been very satisfied with these switches even though I did encounter some small issues. They offer a good set of functions and the mobile app is updated regularly.

With the new wifi button + they just added a way to control both Philips HUE lights as well as myStrom switches at the same time – review to follow.

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