Summary
- Network downtime caused by a glitched-out router or modem can cripple your smart home setup, taking cameras and other devices offline.
- Keep Connect is a $50 smart plug that detects outages and power cycles your network equipment automatically.
- It’s the perfect device to safeguard your network when you’re away from home for an extended period of time.
I was the happy overlord of my domain with my smart home set up just the way I wanted until a simple cable modem glitch came along to burst my smug bubble. So I spent $50 and fixed the problem.
Network Downtime Spells Disaster for a Smart Home
These days you can achieve Jetsons levels of home automation, but without a robust network backbone to support it all, things can fall apart with the snap of a finger. Or in this case, a glitch in your network connectivity. After all of your efforts to make sure that your wireless coverage reaches all of your devices, two bottlenecks within your control can shut it all down: your ISP device and wireless (or wired) router.
I learned this the hard way when I was on vacation overseas and a package inadvertently was scheduled to arrive while I was away. I live in a neighborhood where package theft is a common occurrence, so this left me in a bit of a pickle. “No problem!” I thought, “This is where my handy video doorbell and package delivery notifications can come to the rescue: I’ll just ask my neighbor to grab it for me once it arrives.”
However, when I went to check on my cameras, I discovered that they were all offline. In fact, my entire home was offline. Anxiety up, I checked with my internet service provider, and they reported no outages. The app said that my modem was unreachable. Normally, a simple remote reboot of the modem clears issues like this, but my ISP couldn’t even reach my modem to send the command. Someone needed to physically power cycle the modem. I was stuck thousands of miles away and was blind to the state of my home.
In my case, the problem my cable modem, but fiber ONT devices can also occasionally glitch out, requiring a power cycle, and sometimes it’s the router that crashes. Luckily, my package was not taken by porch pirates. I was able to restore connectivity after I returned home, but I realized that I needed a way to deal with outages like this.
The Keep Connect Can Help
My search for a solution ultimately landed me on a neat little $50 device that resembles (and actually is) a smart plug: The Keep Connect Automatic Router Rebooter. It acts like any other smart plug, giving you the ability to remotely control power to whatever is plugged into it, but its neatest trick is to monitor your connection and trigger a power cycle when it detects a connection loss.
The Keep Connect Automatic Router Rebooter does this by regularly polling servers online and listening for a response to make sure that it is connected to the internet. If no response returns, it automatically shuts power off for a predetermined time before turning the power back on and checking again for connectivity.
Setup was rather straightforward and familiar: plug in the Keep Connect, connect to its Wi-Fi, and enter your home Wi-Fi credentials in the configuration page that pops up. From there, there is a slew of settings you can tweak to best match your network’s needs, but for the most part, I stuck with the defaults.
My ISP recommends waiting a full minute after cutting power before powering the modem back up, so I changed the power-off time from its 30-second default and that’s about it.
Once set up, no further interactions were needed in my case, but you may want to tune some of the many settings available to suit the idiosyncrasies of your network. There are multiple ways to configure Keep Connect to be more or less sensitive to network events in case it triggers too often or doesn’t respond to an outage. You can even schedule recurring power cycles to “refresh” your device once a month or a frequency of your choice.
One Less Thing to Worry About
Since putting in my Keep Connect, I experienced a couple of automatic reboots (one of which happened while I was away from home) after my cable modem choked on a glitch. Thanks to this little smart home addition, it all happened without me noticing or having to physically intervene.
It has worked so well that I even bought a second one to do the same for my wireless router and subscribed to their Cloud Services—$24.99 annually—so that I can manage my plugs remotely and get real-time notifications in case a power cycle is triggered. With more than one Automatic Router Rebooter, you can designate one as the main and the other as a “follower” so they work in tandem when cycling power.
It’s too bad that my cable modem can’t maintain consistent uptime indefinitely without the occasional reboot but thanks to the Keep Connect, a complete disruption has been reduced to a minor 3-5 minute annoyance. For me, that was money well spent. Until something that can’t be fixed with a power cycle comes along to knock the self-satisfied smile off my face.
