If you’re looking for a more cost-effective way to measure power consumption, and you’re only interested in certain appliances, a smart plug could be for you. The Wyze Plug can be bought in a pair for $20, and anything you plug into that socket can be measured. This works for things like your TV, Xbox, microwave, etc. The downside is you’re not going to be measuring your entire house’s energy consumption, but that’s what the other options are for.

The Wyze Plug comes with some cool features, too. If you’re on vacation somewhere, you can actually set your plug to a “vacation” mode that will randomly turn your stuff on and off to make it look like somebody is at home using it. It responds to both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, so your heavy hitters are covered. You can put all of the plugs into the Wyze app and it works exactly the same as the other apps mentioned before.

The main difference here is you won’t have a main hub installed into your breaker box. Eventually, the cost of plugs will overcome the initial cost of having an energy monitor installed, so don’t go overboard.