Photo by William Bradshaw on Pexels The plug you already own is probably the wrong kind I own more smart plugs than I'd like to admit, and for the first year or so, I used every single one of them the same way: as a remote switch for a lamp. Turn it on from my phone, set a schedule, feel briefly clever. That's it. That's the whole use case for most people who buy a basic smart plug. Then I swapped a handful for the energy-monitoring kind, mostly out of curiosity, and it changed how I think about the category entirely. A basic smart plug is a toy. A smart plug that tracks watts, over time, on a per-device basis, is a diagnostic tool — and it's one of the only pieces of smart home gear I've tested that pays for itself instead of just adding convenience. This isn't a "buy more gadgets" post. It's closer to the opposite. Most of the smart plugs on your shopping list don't need to be smart at all. But the small subset with energy monitor...
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