Ubiquiti Networks mFi mPower Wi-Fi Power Strip Review
by Ganesh T S on November 21, 2013 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Home Automation
- Wi-Fi
- Ubiquiti Networks
- IoT
Concluding Remarks
Stacking Up against Similar Products
Coming to the business end of the review, it is clear that mPower presents better value for money compared to other similar products. The UFO Power Center comes closest in terms of functionality to the mPower, but costs more per switched outlet. However, for the extra cost, we have an excellent iOS app. The iOS app for the mFi is still in its infancy, and the Android version is non-existent right now. The industrial design of the UFO Power Center is more striking, but is definitely not a good fit for our lab environment (and we suspect, a majority of the use cases of our readers). The mPower is more conventional in appearance, and that is a definite positive. The Belkin Wemo Insight switch launched this month seems to have similar functionality, but the cost per outlet is thrice that of the mPower. Belkin is arguably better on the mobile app side of things, but it might not be worth 3x the cost for the tech-savvy consumer.
Wi-Fi enabled power switches are an upcoming product category, and another product that we saw during our Amazon search was the Home NetWerks 43601-BX-HN. Most vendors of home automation / IoT products have a business model reliant on subscription fees. They typically charge consumers monthly for cloud access to the devices they have purchased. The product linked above is an example. Most home automation technologies (even those provided by big companies) have some sort of subsription fee attached. This is where Ubiquiti's mFi product line stands out. Ubiquiti allows the mFi controller software to be hosted and controlled on a local server. Any tech-savvy consumer can then open up the local mFi host machine for access over the Internet. In essence, Ubiquiti manages to provide the complete framework for automation and also allows you to control it in any way as you deem fit. This will prove to be a big draw for consumers who don't want to pay a monthly fee for a service they could handle themselves.
Despite the communication protocol between the mFi controller and the mPower / mPort products being proprietary, these run Linux and have provision for root access. That opens them up to a variety of possibilities, as we have shown in our custom application.
Power Consumption
Update: A number of readers have asked for power consumption numbers. A screenshot is presented below, with the window on the right showing the currently running processes / resource usage on the mPower. The window on the left shows the power consumption recorded by the UFO Power Center simultaneously. We find that the mPower unit consumes around 1 W at idle with the network interface up.
With a load connected, the difference in power measured was around 1.2 W.
Final Words
We conclude the piece with a summary of the pros and cons / wishlist for future products in this lineup:
Pros:
- Excellent value for money compared to competing solutions
- Utility-grade power measurement ICs provide high accuracy
- The unit is not tied down to a cloud service (and it is not reliant on an active Internet connection for control and use)
- Open platform provides full access to the collected parameters
- The mFi product family looks outstanding, considering that this is the first generation
- The mFi controller is a full-fledged automation controller with provision for advanced rules creation, analytics, scheduling and event reporting
Cons / Wishlist:
- For the mPower family, it would be nice to have a rackmount version, a weather-proof version for outdoor use and, if possible, conversion kits for existing in-wall outlets
- A dimmer / light switch variant would drastically increase the target market size
- It would be nice to have an increased sampling rate for the electrical parameters (similar to that of the Watts Up? meters which allow users to visualize the current surge that happens when a power-hungry appliance is switched on)
- It would be nice if it were possible for the mPower units to measure sub-1 W power, or at least report it without making leakage power responsible for activating some mFi rules.
- The mFi controller software needs rework for better stability / compatibility
- Official mobile apps for mFi control would broaden appeal
- It would be nice to have official APIs for integration with other home automation systems
- Multi-outlet mPower units could do with at least one unswitched outlet (always-on)
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Daniel Egger - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
So how much is the power consumption of the device itself? Can WiFi be turned off on the Pro version? Why does the European version need to be so ugly? Questions and more questions...ganeshts - Sunday, November 24, 2013 - link
Replied to another poster - the power consumption is less than 1 W at idle, but with the network interface up. Wi-Fi can be turned off -- after all, you have SSH access to the unit - you can do anything you want to be done on a persistent basis using some scripts to run on the device at start time.clarkn0va - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
"The mFi controller software (Windows version) needs rework for better stability"FTFY. I haven't used the mFi software yet, but UBNT's controller software (Unifi, AirVision, AirControl) is well known for running much better on Linux than Windows. Each product has its own development team, but they pretty much all install great on Linux hosts and start automatically as a service.
Meanwhile, the Windows version tend to suffer from installation difficulties, stability problems, and the number one complaint in the forums probably being the fact that they aren't designed to run as a service, meaning that you have to actually log into Windows and run the executable before you can connect to it. This shortcoming has been worked around by users in the case of most of the products (thank goodness for the open nature of UBNT's software product development), but the "easy" way to use UBNT's software controllers, ironically enough, is to run them on Linux.
I realize Anandtech caters to the Windows crowd, but it's not fair to say that a product is unstable when the Linux version isn't, or incompatible when it's available on Windows, Mac and Linux.
dylan522p - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
I like ganesh and many of his articles, but this has to be one of your worst articles ever. I really hope you do not fall and.continue to post article of this level because it honestly is a shame to the Anandtech name to have things like this posted.dac7nco - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
Ganesh, most UPS have at least ethernet+RS-232, and most I've used connect to a switch or router for management, and a PDU for rack management... This is not new stuff, enabling and disabling power connections, nor are WiFi consoles... I've been doing it since 1995.......Daimon
ganeshts - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
Daimon, I think the integration with mFi which allows rules creation is the primary aspect here. Of course, the reason we even wanted to get this unit in is because of its power measurement capabilities (real-time). And the clincher is the price point!We have looked around quite a bit for automating our lab infrastructure and measuring power consumption of various devices during different modes of operation. For example, over the last one year, all the power consumption numbers that I have reported have been gathered through the UFO Power Center. In the future, I hope to use either the UFO Power Center or the mPower unit.
Please do point me to any UPS / PDU combo which can solve the remote switching as well as power consumption measurement problem for us at this price point, and I am pretty sure both us and other readers will be happy to check those out.
dac7nco - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
Checkout Cyberpower and APC; these guys "pure-sine wave" products are leaps and bounds above trip-lite. What you are looking for are their systems which have management consoles; hook to switch with a $2 cat-5 and you're done. Your various sytem/rack-peripheral is offline for maintenance on your own terms. Combine this with IPMI (on your switch)and you manage not only power/power-states/RDP, but you have an IP address for power AND management. Win Win.Daimon
ganeshts - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
Do those vendors have any products which are sub-$200 and can still do real time power measurement? The last I checked, they do have $800 - $1K PDUs with management consoles, and even those do not have real time power measurement capabilities on a per-outlet basis.dac7nco - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
Yep. USB power reporting.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
ganeshts - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link
I looked into the Cyberpower PowerPanel manual, but it is still not clear whether one can log the power consumed by each outlet at configurable intervals / there is a simple API or HTTP query that one can use to poll these values. There is no information on how often these power consumption values get updated too.Otherwise, yes, these UPS management softwares seem to be really feature heavy. As I see in the Newegg comments, $170 is not going to give a network port -- but I can definitely see the appeal for the usage scenario where a UPS is required along with remote switching capabilities
For this product, the appeal would lie in the fact that the unit runs Linux, one can run custom scripts inside the unit and finally, for our purpose, provide an idea of real-time power consumption with high accuracy and with open APIs. Other than the UFO Power Center and the mPower units, I can't see other good alternatives for the feature set. (The UFO Power Center doesn't run Linux, though, but, can be accessed through simple HTTP commands)