Review: Lasco Smart WiFi Aircon Plug

Introduction

A couple of months ago, I was anticipating the summer heat in May and wanted to use my air conditioner more. However, I wanted to be aware of my electricity consumption especially because I split my Meralco electric bill with a roommate. In most homes the air conditioner will consume the most electricity, I didn’t want to turn the AC all day and have to guess how much of the total electricity bill my roommate would be paying nor did I want to just pay a larger percentage of the bill by default. Enter the Lasco Smart WiFi Aircon Plug, this device can track the electric consumption of your air conditioner and enables smart home automation.

Compatibility

You must check compatibility with your air conditioner before buying this device. As long as you have an air conditioner that consumes less than 2.5 horsepower, the electricity consumption feature should work for you. However, to take advantage of its smart features such as remotely turning your air conditioner on or off, creating timers on the app or controlling via voice assistant, your air conditioner must not be digital. It needs to be a dumb appliance. The smart plug only enables those features by cutting power on or off to the air conditioner. So if you unplug your air conditioner while its on and then plug it back again and its on by default, your air conditioner should be compatible with the other smart features. If your aircon has a digital screen and/or a remote, chances are your air conditioner is not compatible with the smart features and you should only buy the smart plug if you want to track electricity consumption.

This device only natively supports Google and Amazon with quasi support for Apple (HomeKit). I was aware of this limitation on Apple devices when I ordered this from Lazada. I’ve owned it for a couple of months now and it’s been meeting my expectations. It’s not perfect, especially the app but I’m able to control my air conditioner from my apple devices through Siri Shortcuts, including timers, although it’s not compatible with HomeKit. If you’re an Apple user like me, there’s not really any other alternative but to get this device since the plug this supports is specifically for the aircon plug that is standard in the country. You can opt to set up Home Assistant of course but aside from Matter support which Lasco may or may not adopt in the future, there isn’t any other options right now if you expect full Homekit support.

Hardware

The hardware of the Lasco Dual Aircon Smart Plug seems well built. There is two input outlets, one for the aircon and another outlet for the electric fan you can also plug into it. The smart plug also has a tiny LED that shows its status and can also function as a night light like how my roommates use them. You can turn it off in the app if you want your room to be dark as possible. Finally, the main plug uses the standard Philippine plug for air conditioners called a tandem plug. The plug type is something a lot of people will get stomped on if they were planning on getting any normal smart plug meter for their air conditioner (I knew it could handle my dinky AC that only reached .5hp). But I digress and it seemed better and safer to get a product that was purposed built for this type of use. As for connectivity, this uses wifi on 2.4ghz for connectivity which most people will have and won’t require a hub to function.

Software

In terms of software, the app could be a little bit better. Once you create a Lasco account, and if you’re not using Apple products, it’s only a matter of connecting your account to Google Assistant or Alexa to use it with your other devices. However, if you do have apple products, there’s an extra step that you have to take. You must define your automations first within the Lasco app and tap the option where you create a Siri shortcut for it. Once you’ve done that, you can use Siri on your device to invoke whatever automation you’ve made and you can also now have those saved in the Siri Shortcuts app which you can surface as buttons in your home screen through widgets. For apple users, you will have to do it for each apple device that you own.

In terms of usability, I only have a few gripes with it because my use case also involves getting my electricity bill and getting the kwh values and deducting the kwh recorded on the app. The problem is, I have to manually check my consumption per day and add them together. The app deliberately makes this difficult because it hides the values for each day until you tap on a certain day to get that day’s electricity consumption. My roommate also does this on his app since he also uses this same smart plug. We then use these numbers to prorate our electricity bill and get a fairer division since our airconditioners are more than half of our electricity consumption. I do see a monthly electricity consumption value for the app but I have not figured out how to align this with the billing cycle on our electric bill.

Security

Now, while I did outline how useful it is and it is a successful practical purchase for me and my use case, there is some security concerns with using this product and I had to do some mitigations to protect my home network. Since this device does not have a smart hub and does function when I’m also away from home, it must be connected to Lasco’s servers the whole time it’s being used. This is an issue because you don’t want something that you do not have control off to be in your home network because it could be listening or could do something harmful if the servers they are phoning home from are compromised. The common solution here is putting smart home products like these into a separate VLAN where they can only connect to the internet but cannot interact with your other devices at home. If you have a modern wifi system, this option is sometimes included where you only need to click on an “isolate” option in your wifi phone app or router management site. In my case, I have a separate network for just this purpose and I’ve isolated this device from our regular home devices.

Summary

Overall, the device serves its purpose on what I need it to do, which is allow me to keep track of my aircon’s electricity consumption. At P1,490 when I bought it, I believe the price was worth it. You can get it on sale for a little cheaper as well on the popular online shops. The rest I mentioned are only nice to have. The app could be improved and support for Apple Homekit would be great but I’m hopeful Matter support on future smart devices may alleviate this concern. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. I wrote this up because prior to buying this device myself, I didn’t really see good reviews on this product especially since I haven’t seen any product that I could compare to it that was also compatible with Philippine window-type aircon plugs.