Do you sometimes find that the wording on a product packaging doesn’t quite match the reality?…

Many years ago in my car racing days, I bought a pair of Halogen spotlights for the front of my Vauxhall Astra 1.2L together with some go-faster gold stripes. Can’t say the gold stripes made a massive difference to the performance though!

Anyway, in I went to the local Halfords in Bristol to buy the items that wouldn’t take very long to install, as it clearly said in bold lettering on the spotlights box.

The gold stripes were on in no time, but many hours later with my mate Adrian, we eventually got the lights working, but it wasn’t as straightforward a process as we hoped.

Looking back though, I think it highlighted the limitation of our DIY skills in our early twenties.

Roll on a few years, and my skills were put to the test once again, but this time I had to admit defeat. What may surprise you, is that this was to do with setting up an electronic timer.

When we go away for a couple of days or more, we like to set the lounge light to come on and off automatically in the evening to let passers-by think we’re at home. So when our usual timer packed up last week, I sourced a similar replacement from Amazon.

One of the special features advertised for the replacement was ‘Easy to use timer setup’, but this was clearly a joke.

It came with a very detailed set of instructions, but quite frankly, they could have written it in Polish and I’d be none the wiser. They had over complicated a device to serve a simple function.

I’d say I’m a dab hand with all electronic items, but I had to admit defeat and return it to Amazon in one piece before it ended up in pieces in the bin!

So I browsed Amazon once again and came across a pair of Wi-Fi Smart Plugs. And oh boy, what a difference! It was setup in a matter of minutes.

What makes it easy is that it’s programmable using an app on the Smartphone or tablet.

They’re slightly more expensive than the traditional digital timers, but at least you won’t have to fork out on a pack of paracetamols when things get a bit heated during the setup process!

Here’s a link to the Wifi Smart Plugs I ordered – https://amzn.to/3cef9YN