Claim:

Loud noises from smart socket adapters can cause stress, discomfort and illness in pets.

Rating:

Context

While academic research shows that loud noises in general can negatively affect pets, there are no studies that determine whether, or to what extent, smart plugs specifically cause such problems. A veterinary expert told Snopes that he and his colleagues were aware of concerns among pet owners, but there is no credible evidence to prove the devices cause harm. Furthermore, there is no generally accepted guidance from veterinarians on the use of such products.

Several Snopes readers have asked us to investigate whether smart plugs—those plug adapters that let you control electrical devices via WiFi with an app or a voice command—emits high-frequency sounds that can’t be detected by the human ear but can cause stress, discomfort, or even illness in pets.

Since November 2023, readers have sent a Facebook post to Snopes that went viral to highlight the alleged risk of smart plugs. The post claimed that a dog named Rowdy started acting differently – he started licking his foot, panting and walking – soon after his owner installed new smart sockets:

When my vet called and I gave her the update, she suggested that there might be some new electronic device in the house that was emitting a high frequency noise that was damaging his ears.

We had just installed new smart sockets in the house about a week ago. His pacing and panting were worse when the lights were on, so I unplugged all the smart plugs. He stopped panting, stopped walking and ate his food. His tail was even up and wagging again.

When I plugged the smart plugs back in and asked Alexa to turn on the lights, he immediately started panting and walking again.

My husband used an app to test the frequency of the smart sockets. It was off the charts. We have left the outlets unplugged for two days and have confirmed that it is definitely the smart outlets that are causing his stress and discomfort.

He is back to being a completely normal dog now. I really thought this was the end of Rowdy based on how he was acting.

That post was no longer available at the time of writing and its original author was unknown. However, another Facebook user shared same message more than a year later, in early December 2024, and the new version also went viral. We reached out to that user to see if there was any information we could use to trace the origin of the story for independent verification. We will update this report when or if we receive a response.

The claim that the outlet adapters could pose health risks to pets has been circulating online for years. For example, people have repeated the claim on one community forum for customers of Hubitat, a smart home company, and Reddit users have detailed alleged cases of dogs reacting strangely to smart plugs.

But while academic research shows highly sounds, in general, may adversely affect pets, there have been no studies to determine whether, or to what extent, smart plugs specifically cause such problems. A veterinary expert told Snopes that he and his colleagues are aware of the concerns among pet owners, but there is no credible evidence to prove that the devices cause harm.

When an electric current passes through a smart socket, the device can emit loud sounds that even humans can hear. Manufacturers call these sounds “coil whine.”

Dogs and cats can hear higher frequencies than humans, and some of our household appliances, such as smoke alarms, emits ultrasound that pets can hear and humans cannot. While humans can only hear frequencies up to 23,000 Hz, dogs can hear frequencies up to approx. 45,000 Hz, and cats up to 64,000 Hz, according to a 2017 compilation by peer reviewed research by George M. Strain, a neuroscience professor at Louisiana State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine who specializes in hearing loss in pets.

As for the effects of these sounds on pets, a peer-reviewed 2021 study by University of California Davis researchers found the intermittent, high-frequency sounds, such as fire alarms, can cause intense fear and anxiety in dogs. That study cites what it describes as a “particularly extreme example” of a dog being bothered by a high-frequency sound its owner couldn’t hear, a story that originally appeared in a book called “Dog enrichment for the real world“:

Dog behavior consultant Emily Strong describes a case working with a dog showing signs of intense, chronic anxiety (pacing, whining, restlessness, disinterest in interacting with its owners). The owners of this dog were baffled by the dog’s behavior and had spent thousands of dollars to rule out medical problems with this dog; no medical problems had been found. The behavior started suddenly a few months before the first consult and continued to get worse; The owners had lived with the dog since puppyhood, and prior to this change, the dog had never exhibited any anxiety-related or behavioral problems. Tellingly, the dog was relaxed and happy when away from home, but resistant to returning home after walks. After much questioning, it was discovered that the owners had installed a sonic (very high frequency) pest control device in the home a few months earlier; after turning off the device, the dog immediately began to relax and returned to its normal behavior over the next few days. These owners were by all accounts very devoted to their dog’s well-being, but they could not hear the device; the dog on the other hand was very bothered by it.

Strong could not tell Snopes her client’s name, but she said the dog was a neutered male lab mix and that the incident occurred sometime in 2011 or 2012 in the Rosedale neighborhood of Austin, Texas.

While the dog “appeared to be affected by a sonic pest repeller,” Strong said, she added that she has only encountered this situation once — despite knowing many dog ​​owners with sonic pest control devices. Strong believes the device was defective or there was a problem with the device and socket connection. “I’m not an expert on sound devices, but in my experience and opinion it seems more likely that this is a situation where people hear about something happening once and over-index the problem, and therefore overestimate the risk rather than it actually being a common or systemic problem,” Strong wrote in an email.

Another study from 2015 published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery found that high-frequency sounds can trigger seizures in cats to suffers from a type of epilepsy syndrome.

But there has‘t been someone credible research yet on whether noise from smart outlets, specifically, bothers pets, said Katherine Houpt, a professor at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine who studies pet well-being.

Ken Gordon, CEO of the Washington State Veterinary Medical Association, said he and some of his colleagues have heard about this concern about smart plugs – but they “have no evidence whatsoever of the bona fides of the claim.”

Furthermore, there is no generally accepted guidance from veterinarians on the use of such products. A spokesman for the American Veterinary Medical Association, Mark Rosati, said the organization had not heard about it ask before.

TP-Link, which makes the popular Kasa Smart plugs, said it has not received reports from pet owners that their noise is negatively affecting their pets’ health. The company said in a statement that while all smart plugs produce noise, the company “places great emphasis on the noise performance of smart plugs, with each of our products undergoing six-page noise tests.”

In the meantime, support page for a Lenovo smart plug says the devices’ coil whine can be “particularly annoying to many users.”

Logic follows that if a sound is annoying to you, it probably is to yours pets too. Yet because there is no scientific research to determine the effect of smart sockets on pets welfare and as there is no generally accepted veterinary guidance on the use of such products, we have rated this claim as untested.