KAUF Power Monitoring Smart Plug with ESPHome, Compatible with Tasmota, Made for Home Assistant

I was SO HAPPY to find this product being that it's made specifically for Home Assistant. Great form factor, power monitoring, and an *almost perfect user experience. As others have mentioned, the OTA updates can fail when you try to update them in ESPHome. The easiest fix is to disable the API encryption key, which reduces the size of the compiled firmware and allows you to upload it successfully. It seems like ESPHome added encryption as a default after Kauf released this product, so this issue isn't entirely their fault. Still giving this product 5 stars.

So refreshing to find a product that just... is what it says it is. Having been at this a short while and learning along the way i'm already real tired of proprietary implementations which require either locking myself into apps and cloud services or taking devices apart to flash with Tasmota. I bought the four-pack of this item and i had all four set up in less than 15 minutes. All local control and NOW if i want i to add any given device to a cloud service or voice assistant, i can do this. It's backwards to the way things usually work and it feels vaguely subversive but i love it.I've not had such a device before (apart from my budding collection of Arduino projects) so i was delighted to find such a comprehensive array of options. Pretty much any metric you could want from a smart plug can be enabled as a HA entity. So you can monitor voltage or on/off state, you can monitor power or current, heck you even fiddle with button and LED behavior without writing a ton of YAML and all this stuff can go into graphs for an overdose of geekishness.Maybe i'm stating the obvious but i'm relatively new to all this and i am just tickled.The documentation is great as well. Clearly written, (not in Chinglish), straightforward, and accurate. Included is only a basic Getting Started guide and there's lots more to the thing but there's a webpage and github (and a whole internet) for whatever else you might like to do.The only criticism i have is that the instructions also advise to import into ESPHome Dashboard -first- to facilitate firmware updates and to rename the entities to something sensible before adding to HA. That's possibly good advice but the problem is that it is on page 12, on the flip side of paper. So i found that *after* i'd gone and set them all up and had four entities in my energy dashboard all named "Kauf Plug". I'd recommend rearranging the manual a bit, or at least referencing this in the "Adding to Home Assistant" section. I wasn't aware there was even such a thing as a ESPHome Dashboard.Oh well the blame is half mine for failing to flip the page. I sorted it, and it doesn't detract from my satisfaction.This product/company deserves applause for a good product that works as advertised and then some. And it deserves support for providing a consumer-friendly product. Let Google, Amazon, and Apple duke it out with Tuya, Sonoff, and dozens of other wannabe smart-thing tycoons with their restrictive and mutually exclusive ecosystems, i suspect the future is in open source and interoperability. I'm usually stingy with my reviews and few products get five stars from me. This one is deserving.

The best smart plug I've seen yet. Since it's pre-loaded with ESPHome, HA detected and configured it right away. Energy use is pre-calibrated, so there's no additional steps required.I should deduct one star because there's not enough on board storage to update the firmware.Other than that, it's an ideal solution.Free Space for OTA shows 417792 bytes but I'm not able to update from 2.055(y) (from ESPHome 2023.7.0)

I've been looking for a good power plug monitor for years. Imagine my surprise when I found one that not only lets me monitor power use, but also allows me to control it remotely? Amazing!First off the packaging is excellent. Box it comes it is both easy to open yet sturdy feeling to protect the product in shipping. Inside is exactly what you might want. The plug and a user manual.Setup requires a bit of technical knowledge. I wouldn't recommend this product to a total beginner with home automation. I had to get ESPHome setup on its own, as the integration with Home Assistant didn't work with my install. Not a huge deal, but it did take me 30 minutes of googling. That's more an issue with ESPHome lacking clean documentation than this product though.Once it was setup? Easy as heck to use. Lots of nice controls. You can control the LED state of the switch with ease, even down to the brightness. The on/off functionality is excellent and very responsive. Even the physical button has a nice sturdy click to it.The only thing I can not really comment on is the lifespan of the product. I have 4 to test with, so we will see after a few years if they stand up to the test of time.Cannot wait to see what other products this vender makes! So far they are excellent!

Nice local control. Wish it had a usb port for firmware flashing. OTA firmware flashing is annoying, one must first flash minimal firmware before upgrading to new update.

I bought two of these, and they're great for use with HomeAssistant. Love that they're totally local with no cloud integration.

I love the customization and freedom with this device. Complete control of everything in esphome and home assistant. Brian has a few extras in his code that I love and never would have thought of - for example there is a virtual switch entity that turns on when wattage is above a customizable setpoint. Brian has exposed a lot of configuration selections to home assistant using lamdas that would normally require me to reprogram my own esphome devices. This device is actually teaching me more about esphome. You should also check out his light bulbs, they're also fantastic. I'm using the plug to trigger notifications that the washing machine is done.

If you need to update your firmware for any reason, like esphome updating or needing to tweak any settings, you MUST flash their minimal firmware before flashing your real firmware because there is not enough space accept it ota. Neither can you flash it from the web interface. This is absolute garbage. The red LED pulses on and off by default, this is MADDENING. On esphome-devices this plug seems to be the same as the Aoycocr X10S, which I have several of and I do not have this problem. I might risk flashing one of these stupid plugs with that firmware because Kauf has loaded these up with trash. Takes forever to compile because there are too many modules being loaded that are not needed on a simple smart plug.