Energenie MiHome Gateway & Sensors Smart Home Review

Installation & Performance

Installing the sensor was nice and easy, I used two 3M strips to get the job done in about 30 seconds. One to hold the bigger unit onto my door frame, and one to hold the magnetic bar onto the edge of my door.

Open my door, the little red light blinks, the Gateway app registers an open trigger. Close my door, it registers the closed trigger. Doesn’t sound complex, but I’m sure we can come up with some fun things to do with these triggers in IFTTT.

The motion sensor pairs in the same way, just hit the button on the inside and it’ll sync to the Energenie MiHome app, which you’ll find in the Apple and Android app stores. I opted to put mine in the kitchen for now, and I’ll get to why in a moment.

Setting up the hardware is certainly the easy part, plug the Gateway into your modem, pair the sensors and any other Energenie hardware you have and you’re pretty much ready to explore your options. Remember, if you’re using Amazon Alexa, you’ll need to add the Energenie skill and then discover devices before they become integrated into your smart home setup.

We’ve already got skills setup for Logitech Harmony, LIFX lighting and more, as well as a range of devices setup that we can potentially trigger using IFTTT.

We’ve already got a few more Energenie devices here, but you can see that as you pair them, they appear on the favourites and devices tab read to use. For now, however, we’ll stick with the kitchen sensor and the door sensor.

Each one of the sensors can act as part of your home security. You can get mobile alerts when one is triggered, and even configure times when they are active, so that you’re not getting notifications for the hours or you’re actually at home. This means you’ll be able to keep track of what you need when you need it with ease. Of course, getting a notification when a door opens or someone walks into your kitchen is pretty basic, so what else can we do here?

If Energneie triggers Then turn on something…

I set up one skill on IFTTT so that when my front door is opened, it powers on my LIFX 800 light in my bottom hall. I set the skill up to turn the light on at 80% brightness, with a warm colour, so that when I come into the house or answer my door, I can see what I’m doing. Of course, I set the timers on Energenie, so it’ll only do this on an evening.

But now your light is left on?

Simple solution, I created another IFTTT recipe to trigger when the door sensor is registered as closed. It fades out my light over 2 minutes from 80% down to 0% brightness. By the time we’re out of the hallway, the light is turning its self off, waiting to be triggered again.

What else?

I did the same thing with the motion sensor in the kitchen, if you walk in, it turned the lights on automatically. Unfortunately, this did suffer some severe delays of a few minutes, but that’s more the IFTTT service than anything else and we hope to see IFTTT improve their response times in the future.

Fun ideas

I put the motion sensor into the sweetie cupboard of the house, every time it was opened, IFTTT added a time stamp to a text file on my drop box. I could then check that log to see how often it had been accessed. Even more fun, I could potentially set another IFTTT recipe to trigger a song on playlist every time a file was added or changed in Dropbox. You could have a bit of fun playing a song from Charlie and the Chocolate factory if someone was sneaking for too many sweets. Why? Because you can.

The open sensor is lightweight enough that you could fit it onto a cat flap for example, helping you keep track of your pets by blinking a light when it comes back of leaves. While the motion sensor could be placed in a garage and set to turn on your heating or music only when someone is in the room, which can save you power in the long run while also adding convenience to your devices.

What’s next?

We’ve got a lot more Energenie products at our disposal, but they’re a little more technical and we wanted to explore the basics of the Gateway and general setup. So far so good, but we’ll be back with heating, lighting, power and more features very soon.