[UniFi] UniFi Smart Power Plug | Review & Troubleshoot

When I purchased my UniFi Dream Machine Pro from the official UI site, this power plug adapter thing showed up as a recommended item. For $19 and at the time I was so excited about building UniFi home network, I have quickly added this item into my cart after just quick skimming of what this does. After 6 months of its use, I have actually encountered an issue for the first time and it required a bit of google consultation before I was able to have it back up and running. So this article contains my review as well as a troubleshoot guide.

What is UniFi Smart Power Plug?

This is a power plug that connects to your network wirelessly using 2.4 GHz band. This device needs to be under UniFi network and specifically need to be adopted under UniFi Dream Machine either Base or Pro, or UniFi Security Gateway. When WAN i.e. internet connection is lost for given amount of time, USP Plug will automatically reboot the connected device e.g. modem as in example above as well as my personal use case.

Basic Setup

If all goes as expected, it is extremely simple to set USP Plug up.

1. Plug the USP Plug unit into a power outlet
2. Wait until it starts to slowly flash
3. Adopt the USP Plug either from UniFi Network App (iOS or Android) or online UniFi Network Controller page. Under the device section, USP-Plug shows up automatically and you can just adopt there. This is interesting because we do not have to specify which SSID the device should be connecting to, or no bluetooth connection to the device to specific network info etc. as seen on third party IoT devices.
4. Plug the target device e.g. modem to the USP Plug.

The official detail instruction can be found here.