I admittedly don’t know much about home automation so please bear with me. I’m in search of the best option for me and my wife to be able to control access to our kids TV’s and game consoles. My wife and I both have modern iPhones and our home WiFi is a Google WiFi mesh router system. We also have a few Alexa pods. I’m thinking of getting some kind of smart plug that the tvs and consoles plug into that we can access via app to setup time slots where they are allowed to play games and watch TV. In addition I want to be able to have a kill switch where I can shut them down if they aren’t behaving. I hear a little about homelink and have searched Amazon for smart plugs but the info is all a bit daunting. Do I need to buy a special hub of some type? How does it all work? Can I just buy smart plugs that are home link compliant? Admittedly confused here.
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Hmm. There are lots of smart plugs available, and lots of options in terms of hubs etc depending on how much fine grain control you want and whether you want to be able to add more different types of devices in the future. But my question would be, what’s to stop the kids just unplugging the smart plug and plugging the tv straight back into the wall? It’s what I would have done!
Most TVs have parental controls built in - check your tv manual.
To answer your question, Most smart plugs in market don’t need a hub. I currently have a couple of cheap Kasa smart plugs. Just connect to WiFi via the app and create a schedule or manually turn on/off as needed. You can give your partner access to the app or just share the same user password.
With your google WiFi mesh, you probably have the ability to block internet to specific devices on a schedule (that shuts down Youtube access on the TV etc).
Many TVs and appliances already have parental controls built in. You may get enough mileage out of those. Otherwise, for something simple, get a TP Link Kasa smart plug, or whatever Amazon is selling. They’re WI-FI based so no extras needed.
My daughter’s tv is a little older. I know it doesn’t have parental controls. Not sure about my sons. I’ll have to check it. As far as the tplink Kasa plugs are concerned I see two versions in amazon. One is a few dollars more and says it supports “matter”. Is this something I should consider?
I suggest Kasa Smart Plugs. No hub required, use a phone app. You set a cadence of on and off times and control manually. App control provides a kill switch capability. Very inexpensive, $20 to $30 for 4 plugs. Obviously, your children could remove the smart plug and just plug the tv into an outlet.
Best thing is use the parental features built into each device. You could tell them the schedule and then turn on the setting in your router for “Known Device Alerts.” Then you’ll get a notification if they turn their wifi enabled console or smart TV on or off as it connects/disconnects to the wifi. You can use that to audit them but don’t tell them how you know.
For set time periods, use parental controls on each device.
For punishment… If you’re worried your kids won’t listen to you if you tell them they can’t have electronics, then they are probably smart enough to unplug the device from the smart switch and plug it straight into the outlet.
Google Wifi has a pretty good system built in. We set up a ‘group’ for each kid then turned WiFi off on a schedule. We could also pause Wifi for one or all 3 kids whenever we needed/wanted to by tapping on the app or by telling our Google Hub to pause the Wifi. Not impossible to bypass (hot spots on phones for example) but worked pretty well until they aged to control their own usage. You can also just go take a power cord or other unique component away for a while.