Visible Energy UFO Power Center Smart Power Strip Review

Concluding Remarks - Unbeatable Value

It is quite rare that I start the concluding section of any review with a positive spin in the headine itself. The UFO Power Center has been shipping for almost a year now, and I can only say that I am a bit surprised it took me this long to find out about this awesome device.

The UFO Power Center is a device with a unique combination of features. In the home automation area, it competes with the Belkin We-Mo Wi-Fi switch. By providing three extra outlets and bundling energy management features for slightly more than twice the cost of the We-Mo, the UFO Power Center is able to acquit itself quite well against the Belkin unit. In the power measurement area, it can replace up to four Kill-a-Watts (for approximately the same cost) or four Watts Up? Pro meters (for a fourth of the cost). The other meters also provide other important line information, but those quantities are already being measured by the ADE7763, and it should just be a matter of updating the firmware to deliver those values. The device can also be used to replace PDUs such as the Web Power Switch from Digital Loggers. The functionality is delivered wirelessly, though the UFO Power Center doesn’t turn out to be cheaper on a per-socket basis. That said, for the extra cost, the user also gets power measurement and energy management features which are not available in the Web Power Switch.

Any user considering one of the Belkin We-Mo switches or a Kill A Watt type product or a PDU would do little wrong in choosing the UFO Power Center over them. The product gets our wholehearted recommendation. That said, we reviewers are hard to please completely. Visible Energy should pay attention to the following drawbacks of the device while planning future products / firmware revisions:

For the average consumer:

• Bulky, industrial design might not go down well with everyone. Despite the size, it is sometimes difficult to plug in wall warts, i.e, adapters directly connected to the electrical outlet.
• Though static scheduling of socket state as well as limited roles support is available, rules-dependent scenes (such as those from ifttt.com) are not directly supported. Users shouldn’t purchase this item under the impression that it would magically lower their electricity bills automatically.
• Lack of physical buttons or switches implies that the only way to toggle the state of the outlets is through Wi-Fi.
• Ad-hoc Wi-Fi based setup might be a bit overwhelming for the non-tech-savvy consumers
• No official Android app yet.
• Visible Energy recommends against connecting very heavy loads. That said, the relay is rated for 15A, which should be plenty for most devices in the household.
• The unit doesn’t have noise / surge suppression, and the recommendation is against connecting this device to a power strip (though I connected mine to a surge protector during the course of the review and faced no issues)

For the geeks:

• There is no way to change the HTTP access port. This might be useful in the case where the user cooks up a custom script to control / query the unit, but wants to use it from an external network. It is possible to set up port forwarding to access the unit via the default HTTP port. However, in the case that this port already forwards to another machine in the local network, the user has no way to access the UFO over the Internet without modifying the HTTP port of the other machine.
• Instantaneous power consumption is updated every second, even though a faster update frequency is possible. For example, the Extech power meter records five values every 2 seconds.
• The power APIs only report the active power. The system is capable of reporting voltage, current, reactive power and power factor, but the reviewed firmware release didn’t expose them.
• As a PDU product (or, in a rackmount environment), a wired Ethernet connection is sometimes preferable to Wi-Fi (Visible Energy might want to do a separate product for that market)

Despite the long list of complaints / suggestions above, we are big fans of the UFO Power Center. The fact that it is Visible Energy’s debut product makes it even more praiseworthy. Visible Energy might face some trouble convincing the average consumer about the benefits of a $130 power strip, but tech-savvy folks will find the price a bargain for the wealth of features offered.

Update: Readers have chimed in with solutions for a couple of the drawbacks mentioned above. With reference to the absence of port configuration in the UFO Power Center, it is possible to configure most routers to map a port on the outside that is different than inside in the forwarding. For the issue with the wall warts, consumers could use some really short extensions cables (there are even pass-through versions to double up the number of devices).