Pet Owners Claim Smart Plugs’ High-Pitched Noises Impact Animals. Here’s What We Know

Claim:

High-pitched sounds from smart-plug outlet adapters can cause stress, discomfort and illness in pets.

Rating:

Context

While academic research shows high-pitched sounds in general can negatively affect pets, no studies exist that determine if, or to what extent, smart plugs specifically cause such problems. A veterinary expert told Snopes he and his colleagues were aware of the concern among pet owners, but there’s no credible evidence to prove the devices are causing harm. Furthermore, there’s no widely accepted guidance from veterinarians about the use of such products.

Multiple Snopes readers have asked us to investigate whether smart plugs — those outlet socket adapters that allow you to control electrical devices via WiFi with an app or a voice command — make high-frequency noises that are undetectable by the human ear but can cause stress, discomfort or even illness in pets.

Since November 2023, readers have sent Snopes a Facebook post that went viral for highlighting the purported risk of smart plugs. The post alleged a dog named Rowdy started acting differently — he began licking his foot, panting and pacing —  shortly after his owner installed new smart outlets: 

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

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

When I plugged the smart outlets all back in and asked Alexa to turn on the lamps, he immediately started panting and pacing again.

My husband used an app to test the frequency of the smart outlets. It was off the charts. We’ve 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’s back to being a totally normal dog now. I really thought this was the end for Rowdy based on the way he was acting. 

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

The assertion that the outlet adapters could pose health risks to pets has circulated online for years. For instance, people have repeated the claim on a community forum for customers of Hubitat, a smart home company, and Reddit users have detailed purported instances of dogs reacting strangely to smart plugs. 

However, while academic research shows high-pitched sounds, in general, can negatively affect pets, there haven’t been studies to determine if, or to what extent, smart plugs specifically cause such problems. A veterinary expert told Snopes that he and his colleagues are aware of the concern among pet owners, but there’s no credible evidence to prove the devices are causing harm. 

When an electric current runs through a smart outlet, the device may make high-pitched noises that even humans can hear. Manufacturers call these sounds “coil whine.”

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

As for the impact of these sounds on pets, one peer-reviewed 2021 study by University of California Davis researchers found that intermittent, high-frequency sounds, like smoke alarms, can cause intense fear and anxiety in dogs. That study references what it describes as a “particularly extreme example” of a dog being bothered by a high-frequency sound that its owners could not hear, a story that originally appeared in a book called “Canine Enrichment for the Real World“: 

Canine behavioral consultant Emily Strong describes a case working with a dog displaying signs of intense, chronic anxiety (pacing, whining, restlessness, lack of interest in interacting with his owners). The owners of this dog were mystified by the dog’s behavior, and had spent thousands of dollars ruling out medical issues with this dog; no medical problems had been found. The behavior had started suddenly a few months prior to 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 the 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 repellant device in the home a few months before; upon turning off the device, the dog immediately began to relax, and returned to his normal behavior over the next few days. These owners were, by all accounts, very dedicated to the welfare of their dog, but they could not hear the device; the dog, on the other hand, was highly bothered by it.

Strong couldn’t tell Snopes her client’s name, but she said the dog was a neutered male Lab mix and the incident happened sometime in 2011 or 2012 in the Rosedale neighborhood of Austin, Texas. 

While the dog “seemed to be affected by a sonic pest repellent device,” Strong said, she added that she’s only encountered this situation once — despite knowing many dog owners with sonic pest control devices. Strong believes the device was defective or there was an issue with the device and the outlet’s connection. “I am not an expert on sonic devices, but in my experience and opinion, it seems more likely that this is a situation where people hear about something happening one time and overindex the issue, therefore overestimating the risk, rather than it actually being a common or systemic issue,” Strong wrote in an email. 

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

But there hasn‘t been any credible research yet into whether noise from smart outlets, specifically, bothers pets, said Katherine Houpt, a professor at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine who studies domestic animal welfare. 

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

Furthermore, there’s no widely accepted guidance from vets about the use of such products. A spokesperson for the American Veterinary Medical Association, Mark Rosati, said the organization had not heard of the issue before. 

TP-Link, which produces the popular Kasa Smart plugs, said it has not received reports from pet owners about their noises negatively affecting pet health. The company said in a statement that while all smart plugs produce noise, the company “places great importance on the noise performance of smart plugs, with each of our products undergoing six-sided noise testing.” 

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

Logic follows that if a noise is annoying to you, it’s probably annoying to your pets, too. Still, because there is no scientific research to determine the impact of smart outlets on pet welfare and because there’s no widely accepted guidance from vets about the use of such products, we’ve rated this claim as unproven.