No idea where these are within their own “ecology” right now, but I think these are about half-price. It is possible to have too many of these, but I haven’t found that point yet…
The answer is 32.
And I’m not just making that up.
For a 2.4gHz router band there is a limit of 32 connected devices at any one time. Since these are wifi enabled and persistently connected one could only have 32 of these connected at once. And that’s assuming nothing else is connected to the 2.4gHz band. Add a couple of phones, laptops or other devices and decrease that 32 accordingly.
Go ahead, ask me how I know this…
Amazon just had a promotion on these for $0.99, might still be going on try PLUG or SMARTPLUG99 at checkout. I don’t know if it’s still going on though, I can’t find any info if it ended.
Every time they have those offers, none of my accounts qualify.
That’s what family and friends are for! I got 5 for $5 last month! (I know, I know, you claim not to have any friends…)
How much for a wifi 6 tri-band mesh router system?
Likely 32. The smart plugs and switches can only use 2.4gHz. You can have 96 total devices but only if 64 of them use the other 2 bands. To date I haven’t found a smart plug that uses 5gHz.
The new one at Amazon is A Certified for Humans Device. Is this the same?
I suspect that 32 device limit is router specific, perhaps related to an internal MAC address table size. For instance, the manual for my Netgear router says “Maximum computers per
wireless network
: Limited by the amount of wireless network traffic generated by each node
(typically 50–70 nodes).” I’m thinking that the network traffic used by a WiFi outlet you turn on or off occasionally is pretty minimal.
I thought that too, but some further digging led me to believe that the actual concurrent connected limit is 32, and that’s true across each band of any router. I’d be curious of the make and model of your router to research this more.
This is silly, but does these actually work for scheduling? I bought 2 Wemo “smart” plugs a few years ago on a prime day deal. While I can shout across the room to “turn on office lamp” and it works, I have never gotten the schedule to work. I also usually not able to turn lights on or off remotely through the app. It tells me the device isnt online, but yet when I get home, I can do it with voice.
So… would love to replace with these, but want to make sure they work as advertised.
Thank you so much for this! This didnt work at first, in Alexa, but that was because for some reason I had duplicate entries under Devices > Plugs. I deleted them and had Alexa rediscovered them. Now the On and Off routines I created work!
YAY! You can also say something like “Alexa, I’m leaving” and she’ll turn on lights at random. Say “Alexa, I’m home” when you come back.
Double check me on the exact phrase.
Sorry, just saw your question. It’s the Netgear N900 (R4500) router manual that mentions the 50-70 nodes typical. I did see several other articles online that mention a 32-system limit. Most of my home automation is Zigbee or Insteon (not WiFi), and while I see 49 devices discovered on my network right now, I’m not sure that I’ve actually hit 32 simultaneous devices on the same band at the same time. You might need to increase DHCP address limits, but if it’s per-band, that sounds more like a WiFi protocol issue than an IP issue (and the Netgear routers typically use a class-C /24 network, so should have address space for most of 250-ish hosts.
I think the 250+ number is how many total devices it can remember, not how many can connect concurrently. I still believe 32 is the concurrent connection limit per band.