Review: Belkin WeMo Switch and Motion Sensor

By Mike Wheeler

As Belkin celebrates its 30th anniversary, the company has released its latest WeMo range of products, designed not only to make controlling your home appliances a little easier, but also give you piece of mind when you are out of the house.

By Mike Wheeler

As Belkin celebrates its 30th anniversary, the company has released its latest WeMo range of products, designed not only to make controlling your home appliances a little easier, but also give you piece of mind when you are out of the house.

There are a couple of products to concentrate on for this review, the WeMo Switch, and the WeMo Switch and Motion. You will need to download the WeMo app to your iPhone or iPad (there is no Android version yet, but will be available in July), get a WeMo Switch and/or a Motion device, have wifi in-house and you’re away laughing.

So how does it work? Pretty simple really. You download the aforementioned app to your phone, which is your control mechanism. You connect the app to your home wifi, which in turn is synced with the switch, which is plugged into the wall socket. You plug you device – iron, lamp, TV, whatever – into the switch and you now have remote control of the device.  You do need one switch per device

But what we really like about this set up is that you can use the 3G network to also remotely control the switches. Who hasn’t wondered if they left the iron on, or heater or curling iron? With the WeMo you can control this gear from anywhere – even around the world.

What you can also do (but we didn’t test) is set it up so you can preset different switch on and switch off times – very handy if you go on holiday, but want the appearance of being at home during night time.

We also checked out the motion sensor device, which can come bundled with a switch if you wish. Like the switch, it is an unobtrusive device, which as the name suggests, has been built with movement in mind. Like the switch, it is pretty easy to set up. You just put it in a place whereby it can be switched on and off by either walking past, or waving your hand, over it. It then talks to the switch which will then activate or deactivate the plugged in device.

Overall we found the process of set up and go easy. The application of the devices is also easy, that we would argue even a hardcore technophobe wouldn’t have much problems setting it up.

Pros: Automates home appliances, piece of mind when out of home; very easy set up
Cons: Need a few switches to cover all devices

4.2 Shacks Out Of 5

Wemo Homepage