On the back of the cheap Amazon dot / Sonos deal I am now thinking is it worth upgrading some of my lights to Philips Hue (they work with Alexa)? Apart from the expense they do look good with lots of possibilities. Anyone have them or have any experience of them?

I’ve got some and they work really well with the echo; however, they are expensive. I’d maybe look at the new IKEA tradfri that just got echo support if I was buying again.

Yes, but only my house outside lights, lights come on when I’m about 5 mins away. Unfortunately IFTTT isn’t sophisticated enough to then turn the lights out after a given time (there is an app in beta testing called Conjure which might do it), so I have a big button widget for that, on my phone.
Anyhow, the app is decent in so much as it starts quick and is stable.

I bought the v1 bridge cheap on eBay and Curry’s were / are doing bulbs on 3 for 2, so total cost was £35. Must admit I have absolutely no interest in doing it inside the house.

lights come on when I’m about 5 mins away

Excellent. I could do with an early warning signal next time I’m robbing you.

I’ve got lifx. The bulbs are expensive individually (£45) but don’t need a hub. App is great. Multiple colour options and timer options. Integrate with ifttt.

I’ve got a Hue setup. I got the hub plus 3 x coloured bulbs initially. Managed to find that for about £120. If you buy the Innr smart bulbs they’re a fraction of the price and are compatible with the Hue hub. I just bought an SES Candle Bulb for £16 from Amazon, the equivalent Hue bulb is £30. The great thing about Hue is it’s compatible with IFTTT, which you set up on your smart phone. Great for setting up geofences, i.e switch lights of when you leave home, switch on when you arrive home. You can also use PIR sensors on hue. Handy for night time visits to the loo.

I have a mixture of hue bulbs, tp link smart plugs for lamps and heaters and a couple of dusk till dawn radar bulbs

I have set up schedules, rather than faff about with geofencing. It takes seconds to change

I’m sure I saw an email from Phillips saying to look out for deals on black friday

LIFX are vastly brighter than any of the other offerings but they are significantly more expensive (and physically significantly bigger as well) and till recently the ap was fairly poor.
I’ve got one LIFX and six or seven Hues around the house.
Love em all!

We’ve got a few. I don’t find the colours that useful but the cheaper white-only ones now are barely more expensive than proper dimmable LED bulbs.

The main thing that’s really useful for us is we have a living/dining room with a combination of ceiling lampshades, light strips along the top of cabinets and a floor lamp that’s over the table. They all get switched and dimmed from a single Hue remote rather than dealing with them separately. Plus we have some scenes where only some of the ceiling lights (which are all wired to a single physical switch) are on that we couldn’t do before. I need to get over to IKEA and grab some of their new £7 GU10 bulbs to do the kitchen and we’ll be able to do all of that at the same time.

Other than that, I just have the porch light on a timer, and we can set up a schedule (with a degree of randomness) for various rooms when we go away. Oh, and for switching off the bedroom light from our phones without having to get out of bed.

Biggest headache is dealing with the old switches. The easiest way to switch things off is always pressing the switch so they get switched off a lot unless you have remotes or PIR sensors all over the place.

Excellent. I could do with an early warning signal next time I’m robbing you.

Crack on then sunshine. 🙄

You’ll all be getting e-bikes next ?

Can’t be bothered with smart lights, no benefit to our house – I have changed all to LED replacements though, especially the kid’s rooms. Massive drop in electricity demand.

The LED candle bulbs, despite being expensive, do stop the constant change of blown ‘energy saving’ halogen bulbs every few weeks.

You’ll all be getting e-bikes next ?

My wife has cerebral palsy and her mobility is getting worse. I think anything that makes her life easier is a good thing. I won’t be getting an e-bike for myself anytime soon however!

I’ve got TP-Link smart switches controlling standing lamps and fans etc, and would like smart lights, but when we had our place renovated we had LED ceiling lamps put in all through the place (regs etc).. Apart froma smart light SWITCH, I can’t see how to get around this issue.
However, our light switches aren’t ‘powered’, so that’s kind of a no go…

DrP

I’ve ordered a couple of these Xiaomi Yeelights from Gearbest for about £9 each. No hub needed apparently as they will work directly with Alexa. Also a couple of their RGBW bulbs too. Will report back when they arrive if they don’t burn my house down.

I started with a starter pack (inc. hub + 3 colour bulbs) and have since bought an additional 6 white bulbs (I meant to buy 3 but didn’t realise they were twin packs, it was a 3 for 2 offer on Amazon), £50 for 6 bulbs isn’t much of a premium over normal dimmable LED stuff

Pros:
Easy to set up
Scheduling stuff (e.g. lights come on gradually in the morning and switch off just after I leave the house etc.)
Convenient to switch on/off/dim lights without having to get up

Cons:
Colour ones seem a bit pointless once the novelty has worn off
Can be delays (and occasional non response) from Alexa
I fairly often think “that would have been quicker just using a light switch”
Dimming control seems to be hit and miss (sometimes I can just say “Alexa, living room 50” and it will change to half brightness but other times she ignores that and I have to say “Alexa, dim living room” multiple times to get it set right. I wish if you swore at her she’d do it faster to…

So vaguely useful, especially the scheduled routines but to me the experience is a bit too sluggish/convoluted to become second nature and make light switches a thing of the past (oh and visitors start to annoy you by using the switches and leaving them in the off position so it all stops working…).

We have a few rooms set up – mostly so we can fake being in the house when we’re not.

Alexa seems to have been getting a bit sluggish lately. We use Yomoni & IFTTT to control scenes and lights going on/off throughout the day. We have key word triggers to turn all the lights off / turn on nightlights etc.

Last year, there was a third off on Amazon’s black friday deals – I’ll be buying some more for the new extension…

Is Hue driven by ‘cloud’ services or can it all be done completely locally without internet?

My concern is that Philips one day bring out Hue Version 2, stop running the servers for V1 and suddenly your £120 set of light bulbs turn into £5 bulbs you have to control with a normal switch.

It all works fine with no cloud accounts needed as long as you’re controlling it via remotes/sensors or a smartphone on your network. There’s lots of alternative software besides the official apps too, at their core they use the open Zigbee standard (with a few Hue-specific quirks) which is why there’s now “Hue-compatible” lights from others like IKEA that work.

You only need a “My Hue” cloud account if you want to have things outside your home network control the bulbs.

I have various Hue bulbs and lamps around the house.

The initial novelty is great. Once that wears off there are fewer situations/places where its good.

I have one in each bedside lamp. Good for dimming one side of the bed if the missus is sleeping before me. They are also set to gradually come on the morning at alarm time (this is my current fav feature)

Whats annoying is that if the kids switch the lights off at the physical switch then voice or phone control don’t work. For this reason I have taken them out of main lights and now just use them in lamps.

simon_g – Member
It all works fine with no cloud accounts needed as long as you’re controlling it via remotes/sensors or a smartphone on your network. There’s lots of alternative software besides the official apps too, at their core they use the open Zigbee standard (with a few Hue-specific quirks) which is why there’s now “Hue-compatible” lights from others like IKEA that work.

You only need a “My Hue” cloud account if you want to have things outside your home network control the bulbs.

Thanks

the only thing I’ve got to add is that the ‘white but coloured’ bulbs (which go from yellowey-white to bluey-white) are a bit of a disappointment to me. The yellow-y white is a bit of a sickly colour and not a match for halogens. Full colour bulbs may be better