u/tom-at-outletpal

So my apartment does not have any ceiling lights. It just has a light switch that controls an outlet on the wall. The problem is that -without extension cords- I could only control lights in one area of the house.

My only parameters were that I didn't want to deal with setting up a smart home automation or have to go through an app/voice assistant.

I did some research and found that there were remote controlled outlets that could do this but it wasn't ideal for me because I wanted something that could leverage my existing light switch.

Ultimately I created a pair of 'dumb' smart plugs that could pair together so that when a central outlet turns on they could all turn on. They synchronize really well together, almost no latency and super simple to deal with. I'm not trying to promote anything but I'm happy to share more in the comments.

I'm mostly just curious if anyone else has gone an alternative path to solving this problem and what kind of success you've had? Is there anything you don't like about your solution?

I thought the light switch in my apartment living room was broken for like 3 weeks.

No ceiling lights. I flip the switch and nothing happens.

Eventually I discovered it controlled one random outlet in the room, which apparently is how a shocking number of apartments are designed.

Then came the process of walking around with a lamp plugging it into every outlet trying to figure out which one it was.

Honestly who decided this was a good system?

And even after figuring it out, the setup still kind of sucks because the second you want more than one lamp, you're back to manually turning everything on and off every night.

I actually got annoyed enough by this problem that I ended up building a hardware product around it later on.

But before all that, I mostly just wanted confirmation that other people also thought this apartment lighting setup was ridiculous.