SkylinkHome PA-318 Plug-In Indoor & Outdoor Electrical Plug Outlet Remote Controllable Switch Receiver for Wireless Home Automation Lighting Appliance Christmas Holiday Electronics Control

This Skylink PA-318 is an excellent product and the perfect companion device to turn my WATTS (500800) model, hot water recirculating pump into an "on demand" type of recirculator.I needed a remote controlled outlet device that could turn on and run my pump for just 60 seconds to get hot water out to within a foot or two of all of my taps, then automatically shut off. It's the only countdown timer I could find with that short of a run time, plus it has more than the needed power rating required to operate such a pump.With my pump located on the water heater in the basement at the far end of the house, I needed to be able to control it remotely through one floor at 20 feet, 50 feet and 70 feet away, as well as from a 2nd floor bath 40 feet away. I bought 4 corresponding SkyLink remotes, model TC-318-1, to place at each location where I needed to reduce the wait for hot water. I programmed each one for 60 second countdown mode and every one of them works perfectly, every time.Now instead of wasting between 1 to 3 gallons of water each time I need hot water, I just press the one button on the remote, wait 60 seconds, turn on the hot water tap and it's hot within 2-3 seconds instead of 30-90 seconds. I also don't need to concern myself about pressing a button again to shut the pump off. It runs for the programmed 60 seconds, which is long enough to get the hot water to all of my taps, then it shuts off.This is the most affordable combination I could come up with for setting up an "on demand" hot water recirculation system, which prevents the pump from running any longer than necessary - like the programmable steady run windows of 15 minutes or longer using the built-in adjustable timers on most recirculating pumps.If you're planning on using this timer for this same purpose and have long pipe runs - if one minute doesn't get your hot water to your farthest tap, you can press the remote button again at any point in the initial 60 second countdown and it resets the countdown for 60 seconds from that point. If the initial countdown is complete and the unit is shut off, pressing it again will just restart a new countdown.If you desire a one press operation for a location where 60 seconds isn't long enough, you can also program the individual remote for that location to run for 5 minutes, which should be plenty of time. Once you get hot water to the tap there's no need for the pump to run any longer because normal water pressure feeds the hot water through the system.I might also add that this unit can be programmed/linked individually with up to 8 remotes and other different models of SkyLink remotes. Each of the single button remotes that I'm using (model TC-318-1) must be programmed as a single (but selectable) function. You can choose to use any one of them as either a manual on/off switch, which requires a button press to turn the unit on and a press to turn it off - or you can program each one individually for various countdown times. Available preset countdown times are either 1,5,15,30 or 60 minutes. You might also want to label each remote for whatever feature they've been programmed for so you or your kids don't get them mixed up.

This is not without its quirks, but I have found it useful for a recirculating hot water pump as have others who have posted comments. I looked a bit at more sophisticated automation systems (zwave) but that seemed to be a bit too much to take on and wouldn't be as easy to use as this. And I found very few remote switches such as this that have the built in countdown timer. The price and convenience of this seemed too good to pass on for this application.I consider this about a 3.5 star product. Why not 5 stars?- Range: It couldn't get from one side of my 2100 square foot home to the other where the pump is located. I had to add a repeater (another $25) to make it work.- Ease of programming: yes, you can use it as a timer, but to program the time, you need to have the remote set to on/off, not timer mode. So you first pair the remote and this receiver in on/off mode, set the timer value, then re-pair the remote to the receiver in timer mode. If you decide you want a different timer value, you have change the mode back, reprogram, and change the mode again. Not well thought out.- Timer accuracy: the 1 minute doesn't really seem to be 1 minute. It's around a minute, but not exactly. I've seen it trip in less than 30 seconds. Not sure if my unit is defective or not, but it doesn't seem to hit this exactly. For my needs I went up to 5 minutes and it works well enough, but I think it should work better at 1 minute. But I don't want to go back and try to measure the 1 minute due to the reason above.Future enhancement: I'm sure this would add some cost, but since I can't easily see if this works (can either check if the hot water comes out quickly or go to the garage to see if the pump is running), I would like to have an acknowledgement come back to the remote to say, yes, I received the command.