Oozing Goo - The Lava Lamp Syndicate

When making my own lava lamps, one of the frustrations I've run into is the amount of time it takes for me to heat up my globe to operating temperature and see how the balance is looking. I have to be home, manually turn it on (or have my Alexa do it), and I have to be able to check on it often. I work 40 hours a week at an office and my free time at home is important. I eventually put one of my lava lamps on a smart speaker wifi outlet to turn it on a few hours before bed so that it's flowing at bedtime and I can verbally turn it off before scheduled if I feel like doing so.

Which gave me an idea. I ordered a Wyze Pan Cam V2 wifi camera that I can access with an app on my phone as well as a wifi power strip with individual controlled outlets and a Leviton wifi dimmer.

Basically, I can access the camera, point it to the lamp I want to monitor, turn on its outlet, and if it's plugged into the dimmer-adjust the heat...all from my phone. So I can start up the lamps when I leave for work in the morning, check how they're doing during the day, and shut them off long before I get home to adjust the fluid.

Is this a great idea? I don't know. Probably not. But that said, I'll likely never even need to do more than two or maybe three lamps at any one time. If anyone has any suggestions to improve the safety of this, I'm all ears.

Maybe I'll add a grounded mechanical timer to the power strip as a fail safe for in case anything goes offline while the lamps are running to provide a built-in shutdown period. I may also be able to find a setting that tells the strip to shut off if it goes offline.

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Unless you just want them running for when you get home, just use a mechanical cycle timer on the power strip

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