Mylocalbytes Reviews 5

Fantastic customer service.

I've been using the Tasmota Power Monitoring smart plugs since 2022. They've been a rock solid part of my home automation setup continously for 2 years. The power monitoring is invaluable for automations. They work locally with Home Assistant using Tasmota over MQTT.

Unfortunately at the 2 year point, all 5 of my plugs rapidly died within a few weeks of each other. However, I contacted customer services and they assured me this was due to a faulty batch back in 2022 that the cause has since been rectified. The company offered to refund/replace all of my smart plugs at no extra cost. I love the product so opted for a replacement and they arrived within days. At today's prices that's £62 worth of product provided without any hesitation on their end.

I couldn't recommend this company highly enough. They're a good, honest business with great products. I'll be buying all my future smart plugs from Local Bytes, there's no alternative I'd consider. I can't wait to see what else they create.

Over the past year, I've been trying to 'decloudify' my life, moving away from services like Google Photos and iCloud, as well as Alexa, Tuya, and other smart-home services that run in the cloud.

Some of this is out of interest in saving money, for other services, it's a matter of privacy, and for others, it's a matter of convenience. Using bulbs that can't be controlled if the internet is down (or the provider servers are down), or are slow to respond, is not acceptable to me.

Part of this included finding alternatives for many of my IoT devices. I replaced Alexa with a self-hosted Rhasspy instance as I only use specific commands. I removed most of my bulbs, but I still have 1 Govee light that's in LAN mode.

Plugs proved problematic to replace. I primarily use them for measurement rather than power on/off, and had been relying on Tuya for a long time. The 'LocalTuya' integration in HomeAssistant had proven tricky to get working, and would often refuse to setup plugs in some situations.

None of the options shown on Amazon did what I wanted. They were either cloud-reliant or didn't offer monitoring. What's worse, almost all of them relied on yet-another-mobile-app to operate, with no integration into HA.

Along comes LocalBytes, with exactly the product I'm looking for. Monitoring of power stats, based on ESPHome (automatically picked up by HA), and no app or cloud needed. It even exposes toggle options for the switch (i.e. to disable the physical button) and LED (to turn it off). No need to cover it with tape any more! At the time of writing, each of these plugs was priced at £12.50, so very competitive with options from huge commercial brands.

Delivery is as you'd expect - it's next working day if you choose DPD, but this doesn't include weekend delivery. At £4 for delivery though, I'm certainly not complaining. It's a small business, but it's offering products that we want, but which didn't seem to be readily available before now.

Local Bytes has good prices, I decided to order some sensors from them instead of Amazon, just to support a smaller company.. but I also found out they sell pre-flashed smart plugs! Well, I could do it myself, but it's such a joy to see home automation as an actual business and taken so seriously. The plug arrived in a custom packaging that also included a QR code to scan to get to a dedicated guide to make it work with Home Assistant! I'll be definitely buying from them soon, once they get more stuff. Yeah, that's the only issue - they don't have many options for smart home gadgets... Hope it'll change soon =)

Fantastic products and brilliant customer support!

Product as described.
Delivery late.

Local Bytes say that orders placed before 1430 will be despatched same day. That means a DPD order placed on a Next Day service before 1400 (and on one occasion the evening before) should be received the next day. While DPD notify that they are expecting the items they don’t get passed to DPD until the next day, making the claim of ‘Next Day’ impossible, because of Local Bytes not DPD. This has happened on three occasions.
Wrong information at best. Beginning to think Local Bytes fully know they cannot fulfil their advertised delivery times.