meross Outdoor Smart Plug, Outdoor Wi-Fi Outlet with 2 Grounded Outlets, Remote Control, Timer, Waterproof, Works with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, SmartThings, 2.4Ghz only, FCC Certified, Non-HK

Ditch the antiquated dusk/dawn timers for your Christmas lights and enter the future, because the delightful magic of HomeKit has arrived. Incredibly simple to setup with HomeKit and program to coordinate multiple outdoor locations for on at sunset or whatever you want. Impress your family by programming Siri to turn on the lights when you tell your Apple Watch to “start Christmas”. It just works. Awesome.

Im reasonably impressed with the Meross products that include an outdoor switch for deck lights, garage door interface to the opener, and mini smart switches. Meross has its own App and skill that works well. I encountered problems when the deck became unresponsive, and opener instructions contained an error. It was very difficult to contact support. Id rate that one star only. I finally resolved problems with YouTube and searches.

Bought this on a flash deal in March in hopes to use it for Christmas decorations in winter. I had a hard time connecting to it as the instructions didnt indicate that on Iphone I needed to edit the app settings in the iOS itself to allow LAN. Once I did that, it worked great.

The first unit I bought didn’t work reliably with homekit, so I sent it back for a replacement. The second unit got really hot and it’s housing melted. I probably had too much plugged into it, not sure as I didn’t add up the wattages of all the Christmas lights, but it has a tag stating not to go over 400w. It should have had a reset switch that trips to prevent drawing too much power and subsequently potential fires. This melted outside when it was in the single digits Fahrenheit.

1) you WILL need a separate app to set up and get it to work with smart things 2) it may lose connection once in a blue moon but you just need to reboot the Meross app and get it to recognize your smart things base station again. 3) Smart Things will almost always turn on both sides instead of individually. No idea why it struggles to control the ports independently. 4) It does appear to be waterproof after a few months of use. 5) it does achieve a solid wifi connection to my ASUS ROG AX router which is in the center of the house, not on the outside wall with this unit. Overall it does what I need it to do MOST of the time. Meross app is glitchy, as expected. SmartThings hub MOSTLY works with it as long as the Meross app stays on your phone. Next time I will just go Zwave.

Works as described

Works flawlessly with HomeKits. Dims café lights directly from iPhone with no issues.

Not always in sync with Alexa

I wanted to like this device and for the first couple of weeks it worked fine. But then it disconnected from HomeKit. Viewing the support site, I learned that new firmware had been released but the update would require downloading and installing the Meross app, which in my book defeats the security inherent with being able to connect and manage devices directly from within HomeKit, circumventing 3rd party app/cloud pass-through of ones data. But since the Meross app was the only path to the firmware update that would supposedly fix the connection issues, I did so. Meross warns that updates may take up to two minutes. This update froze and after 10 or so minutes I reluctantly had to reboot the Meross app (interrupting a firmware update should always be ones very last resort). The Meross app would never again re-pair with the device for another try, despite power cycling the device, trying its hard reset sequence a number of times, and even restarting the iOS device. Opening a support ticket and filling out all the info they were seeking seemed way too invasive and time-consuming just to ask a simple question they failed to address in their FAQs. This thing is going back. I tried a Meross device previously and had a disappointing experience that time too. Fool me twice, shame on me I guess. My smart home network consists of over a hundred WiFi, Zigbee, and Zwave devices and despite the variety of manufacturers that make up that collection, none of those brands have given me as much trouble as Meross has.