Energenie Mi|Home Gateway and Smart Single Light Switch (White) Bundle

First be careful if you buy a warehouse product that has already been registered. On trying to set the gateway up i’d got from Amazon warehouse as a used product I found it would not register. After a bit of searching I found a contact page on Energenie’s website and sent them the details of the problem. Next day they got back to me to say it was probably registered to someone else’s account and already on their server. I sent them the MAC address from the gateway and they emailed me back to say it was cleared and could be registered again. Once that was done the app based registration of the gateway went fine.So far I have connected one light switch to it and that seems to function fine. I have downloads the Energenie skill to Alexa and it has found the switch. I have not seen any delay in asking Alexa to turn the light on or off.Dropped one star due to the product Mac code not being cleared from the server - perhaps that is not fair and really Amazon’s warehouse fault as they should not be selling used products that are not fit to use out of the box.

*** Update **** The new firmware suggested in the comments does seem to address the responsiveness. It's still slightly slower than the Wemo but definitely is more usableI really want to like this product. I want something that I can use with Alexa to turn multi-light fittings on and off without having to invest in multiple smart bulbs. This unit combined with the Relay unit does exactly that for me. ( I had the lights wired for X10 controllers). Also they have light switches that would be just simple replacements for existing light switches, apart from the fact that they require deep back boxes to the light switch, not your standard shallow ones. OK if you are in plasterboard, but a real pain if in brick walls.The big problem with this problem is that the range is very short. barely enough to span one wall let alone two. You would need multiple hubs to cover a whole house. But there comes the rub - the hubs need to be hard wired to your router, therefore you end up with messy cabling running around. The other option is to plug the hub into a powerline unit or a wireless extender with an ethernet socket, which really puts the cost up.the smaller problem is the slow response time. I already have some Wemo plug in controllers that control some plug in lights in the same room as the MiHome relay device. I have created an Alexa group that contains both, and when I turn the group on or off the lamps go off almost immediately but there is a wait of a couple of seconds before the overhead lights go on or off.

I purchased the light switch (see my review on that) then found out I needed this gateway.I linked them all up so as they were talking to each other, great it all worked fine for about an hour when the gateway and the switch decided not to talk.I ended up removing the switch from the system and reloading it, it worked.Tonight I came in from a night out and instructed alexa to turn on the light and guess what not talking again, had to reboot yet again.Give this kit a wide berth it is worse than useless.... if I could give it no stars I would.

Originally I bought this (with the whole house monitor) to monitor energy usage and so that I could keep an eye on various pieces of equipment running off a thermostat. I was concerned by various reviews complaining about short range and was ready to park the unit only a few feet from the electricity meter if necessary. However it worked from our hub without issue. I then purchased one of the plug in monitors, the purple one. If you are confused by all the plugs they have:-Blue = remote controlRed = energy meterPurple = bothUsing this purple socket I haven't been able to find a socket where it doesn't work both to moniter energy usage and remote control, and we have a big house. We have endless problems with wifi and have ended up with no less than 3 repeaters to get reliable wifi signals every ware but this via radio signal works allover. It even works in the shed and greenhouse which is 30m down the garden!Support seems good I had a query regarding downloading the data generated which was answered by a member of the sales team. And yes you can download the data onto a spreadsheet if you want to.