“Discontinued by Manufacturer” D-Link Smart Plug (DSP-W215)

I connected my first Dlink Smart Plug + Thermal Protection to a standing lamp to be used as a security light. I’d had my fill of plug in electronic timers that were either too difficult to program (electronic) or noisy (mechanical). This device fit the bill, and allowed me to program a complex schedule and check the light status while away from home.Some fun features:- You can easily verify how much power any outlet is drawing. Easily see how much wattage your space heater is actually running. Find out how much quiescent power your AV rig is wasting. Find out if you left your computer running in another room by checking the power usage on your phone.- The thermal shut-off gives a sense of security when running a high amperage device.It had a lot of fringe benefits that weren’t mentioned in the sales literature:- It can send a notification when internet connection to Dlink’s servers is lost. This gives you a method to verify whether or not your Wifi is flaky or off-line.- When the power goes off, the relay switch opens, removing the load from potential power surges when service is restored. For example, if the local utility company throws the local branch circuit breaker repeatedly, as happened in my neighborhood two years ago, all kinds of havoc can be wreaked on electronic devices due to inductive surges, low voltages, etc. With the Dlink Smart Plug, you may get an initial surge when the power goes out, but no more than one. I’ve ended up with four additional switches just to exploit this feature. Please note that the plug won’t replace a surge protector. Hmm, that would be a nice feature to add . . .- It’s more reliable than Z-wave controlled switches since it doesn’t have an extra connecting hub or software layer to add complexity. In fact, I’m using one to force reboots on my Wink hub whenever the hub “forgets” the Z-wave network.One feature didn’t work as expected:- I wanted to use it as a temperature sensor to let me know how cold various locations in my house were getting in the winter while I was absent. The temperature reported by the switch is nowhere near accurate—the switch temperature rises above ambient due to the internal electronics, so you’ll never see the real room temperature even with no load on the switch.A few additional notes:- The device requires a WIFI with IEEE 811.n capabilities. WPA2 security is greatly appreciated, and the plug can use special characters in the password which the Belkin Wemo switch couldn’t.- I don’t like pairing devices with the WPS function. It’s not secure, so I have this feature turned off on my router. The manual Wifi association procedure in the application worked perfectly. Just give your phone a bit of time to link into the Smart Plug’s locally generated Wifi station.- A few security bugs have been found in this switch’s firmware. Dlink seems to be on top of things squashing the bugs and pushing out firmware updates. The updates install through the Dlink application.- The scheduling feature doesn’t have the capability to turn off a switch without having a corresponding “on” command. I like “all off” commands that operate at 2am to ensure certain items like the iron are off. I can’t easily do that with these Dlink switches.- $50 is too much to pay for this switch. Fortunately, Amazon regularly lowers the price to $40. Hopefully, someday to $20.*** Update 7/15/2017 ***A software bug was introduced the the last update that came out in the January/February time frame. This bug keeps the devices temporary WIFI stations from shutting down after connection to your houses primary WIFI. Effectively, you get a separate WIFI station for every one of the DLINKs you own. I had 13 DLINK DSP-W215s up and running in my house before the bug. When the bug hit, my WIFI became erratic, throwing devices running Netflix online every five to ten minutes, causing iPhones and iPads to connect to the DLINKs where they couldn't receive internet connection, and slowing my data speed dramatically with all the channel hopping my system was doing. In March, I contacted Dlink and was told they knew about the bug and would fix it in April. It's now July, and no bug fix. 12 of these devices are sitting on the shelf waiting for the software fix. What a waste of money.

Update: 01/11/2016I've got 2 of these. One of them just died even though I didn't use it much. As I said in my review back in 2014, this is a half-baked product that they shouldn't have put out onto the market. The Android app that's supposed to work with this smart plug is so unstable.---Update: 9-30-2014---D-Link has fixed the issues I had previously with their more recent app updates. Now, it is a really good functional device. But for them to release a half-baked product, only to use the early adopters as "guinea pigs," I took off one star. They should have beta tested this device extensively before letting it out on the market, instead of putting off so many early adopters who had to spend so much time and energy in vain to make this work. In my opinion, the product would have earned 4+ star ratings instead of the 3+ it is now getting because of D-Link rushing this product to the market.---Update: 6-17-2014---After about 1 week of usage, the D-Link android app no longer displayed the several smart plugs I installed, even though these devices are listed on mydlink account. I removed the smart plugs from mydlink account and reinstalled all them over again, but all the same. After I exited and relaunched the app, they all disappeared. It looks like there are some nasty bugs in the Android app they have yet to fix. I really can't afford to spend any more time on this half-baked product. I'll send them packaging back to Amazon. Too bad, I really wanted them to work.I called D-Link tech support, but it was an exercise in frustration, since these first-tier support folks obviously have zero experience using the product they are supposed to provide support for. I said I was using the Android D-Link Smart plug app, but he kept talking about the iPhone.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Frankly, I didn't have much of an expectation given my bad experience with the poor execution of Smart Plug's competitor, WEMO. The initial setup on my Android tablet went quite smoothly until I got to the point of creating a mydlink account for remotely controlling the Smart Plug. It kept giving me a "cannot create account" error message. I went back and tried to reconnect the device and for some reason I was able to create an account with the Smart Plug app. (Note that you cannot just create an account online on your own; you have to do it using the app. associated with your D-Link device.) And if you update the firmware, you will have problems reconnecting it. What I did was to clear the existing data from the app, unplug the Smart Plug and plug it back in. Everything seems to be working fine now.There are two things that D-Link needs to do at this point:(a) Iron out the wrinkles on their app and/or their firmware to make the installation process problem-free.(b) Lower the price points a bit if they want this to be more popular or gain more market share before everybody else floods the market with this type of product. $50 apiece is quite steep.

La compra resultó un fiasco.El aparato no funciona. Intentar configurarlo con la red wifi local es una pesadilla. Incluso viendo videos tutoriales en internet.Cuando finalemente parecía haber superado ese problema, resulta que la clave o PIN Code que viene en una tarjeta dentro de la caja, nunca la reconoció la aplicación de la empresa.Es decir, nunca pude confirgurarlo para que operara como promete.Simplemente en el último paso, la App no reconoce el código incluido y no puede completar la confirguración.El caso es que es un desperdicio.El servicio a cliente de la marca es deficiente y nunca pude obtener ayuda concreta para saltar ese paso.Recomiendo evitarse un dolor de cabeza y no comprar este producto.Una pérdida total de dinero y tiempo.

Muy malo! Tengo 2 cámaras D-Link y por eso adquirí el Smart Plug... Estuve 2 semanas tratando de hacerlo funcionar, llamadas a soporte, actualizaciones de firmware y nada. Decidí regresarlo y estoy esperando mi reembolso.

Simplemente no sirve. No lo pude activar. Marca error al activarlo y en un blog sugieren que use Android pero la página de DLink no resuelve nada.

Traté de diferentes formas, incluso con diferentes módems y no pude

Así como viene no va a funcionar, hay que actualizar el firmware de manera manual por ahí encontré un foro de dlink en donde te dicen como hacerlo y es muy fácil, ya después funciona muy bien.