Got To Glow

The Wemo Mini on the hall shelf still clicks when you press its button. Ask Alexa to turn it on and nothing happens: on 31 January 2026 Belkin shut the Wemo cloud and app, per its Wemo support page, killing remote access and voice control. That is a bricked smart device in 2026. It powers on. It just can't do its job.

Keep, repair or replace? The answer depends less on Belkin than on where you bought it, and when.

Who pays for a bricked smart device after the warranty ends?

If the maker's warranty has run out, Belkin owes you nothing, so any money has to come from statute: in the UK and EU that means the retailer, and in the US it usually means nobody at all.

Belkin's terms are plain: refunds only for products still under warranty on or after 31 January 2026, with proof of purchase. Past that, look elsewhere; it is the same split that decides who pays for a device failure in month 14.

Outside the US, the claim was never really against Belkin. The UK Consumer Rights Act 2015 (sections 9, 10 and 24) requires goods of satisfactory quality, durability included, and that duty sits with the shop. Article 7(3) of the EU Sale of Goods Directive 2019/771 goes further: the seller must supply the updates a buyer could reasonably expect, and retailers must now spell that out in the EU legal guarantee notice and its new label.

The US is thinner, and the stock lemon-law advice is out of date here. California's SB 898 would have required a disclosed minimum support period of at least five years, but the CalMatters Digital Democracy bill record shows it held in committee on 13 August 2026. No state law yet gives a US buyer that right.

Four numbers set your leverage, drawn from Belkin's Wemo page, the FTC staff review PIRG summarised in November 2024 (as of 2024) and the EU Cyber Resilience Act timetable.

That disclosure gap is the one US owners can use. The FTC said silence on support periods may breach the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and the FTC Act, so a missing end date is grounds for a free deception complaint.

Smart home end of support: US, UK and EU rights compared

The UK and EU give a buyer a claim against the retailer that can outlast the maker's warranty, while the US offers only the warranty itself and a possible deception complaint to the FTC.

Read the table by your receipt, not your passport: who pays first, then what you can claim, then the rules behind it.

The purchase cut-offs in the third row are our own arithmetic: each country's claim window counted back from the shutdown date. A US owner past warranty has no row that helps.

Do Wemo devices still work after 31 January 2026?

Some do: Wemo plugs and switches paired to Apple Home before the shutdown keep working locally, and the Thread models are unaffected, but everything else on the Wemo line-up lost its smart functions.

Survivors include the Mini Smart Plug, the Video Doorbell and the WLS0503 switch. Insight, Link and the Crock-Pot are replacements.

Where a refund claim against the shop falls apart

A retailer claim can fail for ordinary reasons: no proof of purchase, a device that was never paired locally before the cutoff, or a shop arguing that a cloud service was never part of what it sold you.

That last argument is the real grey area. No UK court has ruled on whether switching off an app makes a plug unsatisfactory, or none I can find. My view: for a device sold as smart, with the app on the box, a shop will struggle to call the app optional.

A plug on a dead app also gets no patches, the exposure covered in how to protect your smart home from cyber threats. The UK product security regime, per its gov.uk policy paper, makes makers publish a minimum security update period, so you see the end date before paying. It awards no refund, though.

• Find the receipt first; Belkin and the shop will both ask for it.
• Don't factory-reset an Apple Home Wemo; Belkin's list covers only devices set up before the shutdown.
• A private second-hand sale gives you no statutory claim against anyone.

So: keep, repair or replace? Keep anything on the Apple Home or Thread lists. Repair is off the table: nothing a screwdriver can reach is broken. Replace the rest, but first, if you're in the UK or EU and your receipt clears the cut-off, write to the shop this week asking for a price reduction under the Consumer Rights Act or EU directive, receipt attached.

The hinge went first. Fourteen months after delivery, the lid began lifting off its base on every opening, and the screen flickered past ninety degrees. The maker's one-year warranty had lapsed, and its support chat offered a paid repair quote. That quote is the wrong first move. In the UK, statutory warranty rights outlive the manufacturer's promise by years, and the business that owes you the fix is the shop that sold the laptop, not the brand on the lid.

Can I claim for a faulty laptop after the warranty has expired?

Yes, in the UK a laptop that develops a fault after the maker's warranty ends can still be claimed for, because the Consumer Rights Act gives you rights against the retailer that last far longer than a one-year guarantee.

The warranty in the box is a voluntary extra. Your statutory rights are the floor beneath it, and a 2026 Which? guide to faulty goods, updated on 1 September, is plain that they run against the retailer rather than the manufacturer. So write to the shop: the brand can sell you a repair, but only the retailer owes you one. EU buyers now see this spelled out before paying, via the new mandatory EU legal guarantee notice on product pages.

Timing is harder. For six months the law presumes a fault was there on arrival; after that, Which? says, the burden is yours. At month 14 that means a written report from an independent technician saying the fault is inherent, not a knock. I'd pay for that report before arguing with anyone, because it costs less than losing the argument, usually.

Paying in instalments doesn't move that duty, though refunds on a split plan follow the lender's rules, as our guide to Buy Now Pay Later refunds and statutory cover on device financing sets out.

Four numbers settle what a month-14 claim gets you. Three come from that Which? guidance; the window share is my own arithmetic from its limits, not a published figure.

The repair-attempt rule is the lever most people never pull. Once the shop has had its go and the fault returns, the fight stops being about proof and becomes about what you get back. Keep every job sheet.

How do statutory warranty rights compare in the UK and EU?

Both outlast the maker's warranty, but the UK gives you a longer window to pursue the retailer, while EU rules since July 2026 reward repair and make manufacturers fix some kit after the guarantee ends.

The European Commission says the right to repair directive applies from 31 July 2026, and it changes the maths for EU phone and tablet owners. Read each row as a question for the shop or maker.

UK buyers have time but carry the proof; EU buyers earn extra cover for choosing repair. Laptops fall into a gap, because the Commission's post-guarantee list names phones and tablets, not laptops. Whether a battery that fades at month 14 counts as a fault or as fair wear is, in my opinion, the least settled question here.

Where an out of warranty repair claim falls apart

Month-14 claims usually fail on evidence and paperwork rather than on the law itself, because the fault has to be shown to be inherent and the retailer must get its chance to repair first.

US buyers start elsewhere. The FTC's warranty guidance, last updated in December 2025, says implied warranties such as the implied warranty of merchantability come from state law, last up to four years in some states, and can be excluded when a seller marks goods "as is" where the state allows it. Read the receipt first: two words can erase the claim.

I'd also push back on the checkout pitch. An extended warranty mostly duplicates rights you already hold against the shop for faults, so it earns its price only through accidental damage cover. Buy it for the drop, not the defect. Who pays gets murkier still when an AI shopping agent buys the wrong thing on your behalf.

• Paying an independent repairer first hands the retailer an argument that the repair caused the fault.
• Accidental damage is never a statutory claim: a screen cracked by a fall is yours to fix.
• Messaging the brand is not a claim; the shop must hear from you in writing.

Repair it, through the retailer. For a month-14 failure with no drop or spill behind it, that is the call. Replace only if the shop's repair fails, and pay a repairer only after a written refusal. This week, dig out the order confirmation and send the shop a dated email that cites the Consumer Rights Act and asks for a repair by a named date.

Related: who owes you a refund for a bricked smart device

Your two year old washing machine stops draining. You dig out the receipt, and the retailer tells you the manufacturer's warranty ran out last month, so there is nothing they can do. That answer has always been wrong inside the EU. From 27 September 2026 it also gets harder to give, because the EU legal guarantee notice has to sit on the product page you bought from, in colour, before you click pay.

Why the EU legal guarantee notice matters now

The notice matters because the right it describes was already law and almost nobody used it, and a rule that forces the wording onto the product page removes the retailer's most reliable excuse.

The underlying cover is old news. Anyone buying goods in the EU gets a minimum of two years of protection from the seller, counted from the day the goods arrive, and that has been settled law for years. What was missing was any duty to say so at the moment it would change a decision. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960, adopted on 25 September 2025, fixes the wording and the artwork. Directive (EU) 2024/825, the Empowering Consumers directive, supplies the legal hook, and Article 22a of the Consumer Rights Directive is where the display duty actually lands.

The interesting part is who this disciplines. Not the manufacturer. The legal guarantee is owed by the shop that took your money, so putting the notice on that shop's own product page strips out the "contact the manufacturer" deflection that has done most of the damage. We have seen the same shape before, in the way UK statutory cover beat provider policy on Buy Now Pay Later refunds, and again in the state by state cancellation patchwork that replaced the federal click to cancel rule. The cover existed. The disclosure did not. The gap between the two is where shoppers lost money.

And there is real money in that gap. The European Consumer Centre in Spain, run under the Ministerio de Consumo, reported recovering roughly 700,000 euros for consumers across its 2025 caseload, almost all of it on rights those consumers already held before they complained. Read the four figures below as what this rule is worth in practice, not as a summary of what it says.

The repair extension is the one worth planning around. Pick a repair rather than a replacement while you are still inside the statutory window, and the clock restarts far enough that a second failure of the same part still lands inside cover. Retailers push replacement because it closes the file and ends their exposure. Convenient for them. It can quietly cost you the extension.

What is the legal difference between warranty and guarantee?

A warranty is a promise a company chooses to make and writes the terms of itself. A guarantee, in EU law, is the cover the seller owes you whether or not anybody promises anything at all.

That distinction is exactly what the two new on-page items are meant to separate. One is a notice about a right. The other is a label about a product claim. Confusing them is how shoppers get talked into paying for protection they already have, so it is worth seeing the two side by side before the notice starts appearing.

Read down the first column and the practical rule falls out on its own: the legal guarantee is the one you can rely on without reading anything, and the labelled one is the tie breaker between two products that both already carry it. Neither replaces the other, and a seller who implies otherwise is selling you something.

Is a guarantee legally binding, and where does it fall short?

Yes, both kinds bind, but they bind different people in different ways, and the gaps that will annoy shoppers most sit in enforcement and in what this new notice deliberately leaves out of scope.

Line up the four 2026 dates and something becomes obvious that none of the source documents says outright. Transposition in March, an easy cancel button in June, a repair duty in July, the guarantee notice in September. Four separate consumer obligations landing inside a single six month window, which is the fastest run of retail-facing rule changes the EU has shipped in years. That pace is the story, and it is also the reason compliance will be uneven for months after each date.

Scope is the other soft spot. The notice is about goods, so it says nothing useful when the thing that failed was a service, an app, or an automated purchase you did not personally make. That last category is growing fast, and the question of who pays when an AI shopping agent buys the wrong thing sits well outside anything a guarantee notice can answer. The same is true for connected home devices that stop working when a cloud service is withdrawn, where the hardware is fine and the failure is somewhere else entirely.

• A missing GARAN label tells you nothing about build quality. Producers opt in, and plenty of durable products will never carry one.
• Second hand goods can be cut to a one year floor, but only where the seller discloses that clearly before you pay.
• Enforcement runs through injunctions brought by competitors and qualified consumer organisations, not through a hotline that fixes your washing machine this week.
• A trader outside the EU selling into it is still a distance seller. Marketplaces are in scope, which is precisely where compliance will slip first.

Do one thing this week. Open the last expensive thing you bought online, find the seller's returns and guarantee page, and check whether it still points you at the manufacturer. If it does, that page has three weeks left to be correct, and knowing it is wrong is what turns a shrug at the service desk into a claim the seller has to answer.

Related: statutory warranty rights when a laptop fails at month 14