Shelly’s Gen 4 smart home devices take a different approach

If you don’t know Shelly, you should. Extremely popular among hard-core smart home enthusiasts, the company introduced the fourth generation of its innovative smart home controls at CES this week.

What makes them different? Instead of supporting Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or Zigbee or Matter, the Shelly Gen 4 Series supports all those protocols. The user just needs to decide which one they want to use for their particular setup. And if you decide to switch to something different a few years down the line, you won’t have to start over with new hardware.

Many of Shelly’s lighting control products also look different. That’s because many of them are relays that mount inside the electrical box and behind your existing switches. When you wire the two parts together, you’re converting dumb switches and dimmers into smart switches and dimmers, exerting the same amount of effort it would take to replace a switch. But that’s an advantage, too—your smart switches won’t look any different than your dumb ones.

Shelly

But you don’t even need to deal with electrical wiring to get started with Shelly’s new products. If you just want to control a lamp, for instance, you could pick up a Shelly Plug US Gen4 smart plug. Plug it into any 120V outlet, plug the lamp or small appliance (up to 1800 watts) you want to control into it, configure your app, and you’re done. And unlike many smart plugs on the market, Shelly’s will also track precisely how much energy that device is consuming.

Moving beyond lighting control, the new Shelly Flood Sensor Gen4 will alert you when water shows up in places it shouldn’t, such as under your water heater, dishwasher, or washing machine. In addition to the sensor embedded in the body of this device, it comes with a cable that can detect water along its entire length so you can monitor multiple appliances with one sensor.

Thanks to Shelly’s protocol agnosticism, you can use its Gen4 devices in nearly any smart home ecosystem: Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings… The list goes on. But if you haven’t settled on a smart home hub, you might consider Shelly’s own Wall Display X2. Outfitted with 6.95-inch color touchscreen, this panel combines ease of use with advanced features such as integrated sensors for temperature, humidity, and ambient light. The X2 also supports customizable scene creation and real-time power monitoring.

Shelly expects initial Gen4 devices to ship in the first quarter of 2025.