The smart home that starts at £5.49 — and tells you what it is costing you

One Wi-Fi smart plug. At £5.49 the Tuya plug needs no hub, connects straight to your router, works with Alexa, and includes energy monitoring. You will know within a week whether smart home is something you actually want before you spend anything more.

Only for Philips Hue. The Hue bulbs use Zigbee rather than Wi-Fi, so they need the Bridge — which is included in the starter kit, so it is not a separate purchase. Every smart plug and the doorbell here connect directly to your Wi-Fi.

It is accurate enough to be useful, which is the point. The reading tells you what a device is drawing in real time, so you can compare one appliance against another and find the expensive one. Treat it as a tool for comparison rather than as a substitute for your electricity meter.

The smart plugs work with both Alexa and Google Home, so either assistant is fine. Philips Hue supports Alexa, Google and Apple HomeKit. The Echo Dot is Amazon's own, so it is Alexa by design.

If you want one lamp to change colour, no — cheap Wi-Fi colour bulbs cost far less and will do that. Hue is worth the money if you want a lighting system: reliable Zigbee connection that does not load your Wi-Fi, colour that matches across bulbs, and the ability to grow room by room without replacing anything.

No, and this trips people up. A smart plug switches power to whatever is plugged into it, so it suits lamps, heaters, fans and chargers. It cannot dim a light, control an appliance with a mechanical dial, or operate anything that needs to stay on — a freezer on a smart plug is a bad idea.

The one on this page is a compact, app-controlled model at £149.99 aimed at daily maintenance — dust, pet hair and crumbs — rather than deep cleaning. If you want mapping, no-go zones and far stronger suction, expect to pay considerably more; the cheaper robots in the store use simpler navigation.

Because their listing pictures failed a check we run on every image here. We look at each one for a claim the store cannot support — a price that contradicts the checkout, or a rating, award or review count, when the store has no customer reviews at all — and for a picture that shows a different product from the one named on the listing. Four failed: the WiFi Smart Plug 4-Pack, whose image prints an Editors’ Pick award and a 9.2/10 score the store has never been given, and shows US 125-volt hardware on a UK product; the Tommee Tippee GroEgg2, whose picture implies a Wi-Fi connection the nightlight does not have; the Anker Soundcore Work, pictured with no Anker branding; and the Compact Robot Vacuum, pictured as another brand’s robot vacuum. All four are still compared and priced above — they just have no picture, because a wrong picture is worse than none. The same check ran over the rest of the department, which is why the £23.78 desk lamp, the £15.97 LED strip, the £74.68 OKP robot vacuum, the £85 Proscenic and the £59.99 UR1 are absent from the grid below as well: every one of those five graphics prints a price between £1 and £99 that the store does not charge. A product with no picture is a lost sale; a product with a picture that misstates the price is a refund and a complaint. That is the trade we made.