I bought these plugs to help manage interior lights (put them on a schedule) and also to charge devices during overnight hours when electricity rates drop but I'm typically asleep. They work for all those purposes, but I have to downgrade the product on overall usability. To manage the schedule you have to use the "Cync" app on your smart phone, and this is where the problems start. The app is beautiful looking but not easy to use, and in general seems over-designed and under-thought. Its arrangement might make sense for a complicated home setup with multiple smart lights and other similar devices, maybe integrate them with an Alexa, but all I want is to put plugs on a timer. To do this, I had to choose names and for some reason images for each plug and each room the plugs were in. More than half of the setup seems completely unnecessary. Only when all this was completed was I allowed to program a schedule (alternatively you can program a "scene," though it isn't ever explained what "scenes" are for or why you'd want to use one). Once you've done that, the plug name and the room name each have an unlabeled slider button - one of them (I think) arms the schedule - or perhaps the scene - and one of them (I think) turns the plug on/off manually. After 3 days of using them I'm still uncertain of their function. Probably if I was using this every day I'd eventually figure it out and retain that information, but I'd prefer to set it up once and then not think about it. Labeling the slider buttons (e.g. "Manual On/Off," "Arm/Disarm Schedule") would have solved that problem, but perhaps wouldn't be as aesthetically pleasing? I can't explain why they don't label their controls, it's baffling. Each plug comes with a small set of instructions which is not detailed enough to answer questions; there's a toll-free support number, but I feel I shouldn't have to talk to customer support just to put an outlet on a timer - the analog timers I can get at any hardware store are intuitive and easy to use. I almost always have things I'd rather do than spend 20 minutes talking to tech support. Bottom line, the app looks great but is hard to figure out; it's frustrating to see overly clever user interface design get in the way of using a product for a simple purpose. The app prompts me to turn on Bluetooth and WiFi on my phone whenever I open the app, but once the plugs are programmed, there appears to be no reason to need either one (Bluetooth or WiFi). Maybe I'm misunderstanding the point of enabling Bluetooth and WiFi, but here again those features aren't explained in the instructions and I'm not going to call tech support to find out. Since initially programming the plugs and entering the WiFi network info into the app, I can now use the app to turn plugs on & off manually, or adjust their schedules, all without having either Bluetooth or WiFi on. That's handy, but it tells me that the app uses cellular data to communicate with an external host of some kind that then communicates with the plugs via the Internet and my home WiFi. This seems more complicated and prone to privacy/security problems than it needs to be. I'd prefer to have to use Bluetooth or WiFi to communicate with the plugs directly from my phone, and cut out the middleman and any security risk that entails, but my guess is these devices are intended to gather data about their users so there is no ability to use them without connecting them to the Internet. Something I liked about the app was its ability to reference a program schedule to sunrise and/or sunset. This allows you to turn lights off based on sunrise, or turn them on based on sunset. My analog timers won't do that. On/off times can be adjusted from sunrise/sunset by minutes or hours, which is nice.
