We've started to experiment with smart lighting in the house, in the form of some Philips Hue bulbs and lamps. It is early days, but here's our experiences so far.
The starting point for the wider system was a White Starter Kit, consisting of two white LED bulbs and a bridge. Unfortunately we couldn't get the UK standard B22 bayonet fitting bulbs in a starter kit form, so instead we now have two US/EU standard E27 screw fitting bulbs. This isn't a huge problem as we have a couple of compatible lamp sockets, including the pendant luminaire over the table in the dining room and a bedside table lamp in the bedroom, so the bulbs were installed nice and simply.
The bulbs form a ZigBee wireless mesh network between themselves and the bridge, with the bridge bridging the ZigBee network to our home wired Ethernet LAN. So we plugged the bridge into our broadband router (actually, we've now connected a 4-port Ethernet hub to the router, and have the Honeywell Evohome gateway, the Philips Hue bridge, and an eQ3 HomeMatic gateway connected to the hub) and installed the Hue app on our Android tablet. One of the good things about the starter kit is that the bulbs and bridge are pre-paired, so when everything is powered up and the app is started the lamps are already registered and ready to go.
The standard Philips Hue app is pretty straight forward. We can control the brightness of each lamp manually, or we can set up and activate a 'scene', which is a stored configuration of brightnesses for each lamp. We've created scenes with the dining room light at full brightness for when I'm working from the dining table, and at a lesser brightness for when we're dining. The app also has the possibility to create 'alarms', which are time-based triggers to activate scenes. We've experimented with one that fades up the bedroom lamp in the morning over a 15 minute period, as assistance for the alarm clock.
The major issue that we've identified so far is that it is actually really inconvenient to fire up the tablet to turn a light on or off, and more often than not we've just turned the wall switch off and back on. This activates the Hue bulb's default behaviour, which is to turn on at full brightness. We're obviously not alone in this respect so we have a couple of dimmer switches on order, which should work in parallel with the app, and give us that physical switch on the wall to press.
There's another issue with the Hue app, in that it just seemed to crash randomly while I was trying various options. This turned out to be an issue with Android app permissions, but instead of displaying an alert to the user the app was just crashing. It is easy to resolve though, just go to Settings - Apps - Hue - Permissions and ensure all of the permissions are enabled.
So far we've been looking at white lamps. This is mainly due to cost. The white bulbs are about £15 each, whilst a multi-colour bulb is £50. With 25 ceiling lamps in the house (we've got ten GU10 downlighters in the kitchen alone!), we're not going to be installing multi-colour bulbs this side of a lottery win.
But we have taken a foray into multi-colour with a Hue go lamp. This connects into the ZigBee network, but is battery powered and portable, so we can move it around the house whilst we experiment. At the moment we've got it on the floor in the lounge and are using it to flood a wall with light. Movie nights now have a bit more ambience than before. I've also played with the geo-fencing feature of the Hue app, which can be used to trigger scenes on arrival or departure, so that the go lamp turns off when I leave the house, and back on when I come back. There's an option in the app to only enable this functionality after sunset, so I'm not turning lamps on and off during the day.
The next thing I want to play with is IFTTT integration, and see if I can use the go lamp for weather updates, email notifications, and more!
The starting point for the wider system was a White Starter Kit, consisting of two white LED bulbs and a bridge. Unfortunately we couldn't get the UK standard B22 bayonet fitting bulbs in a starter kit form, so instead we now have two US/EU standard E27 screw fitting bulbs. This isn't a huge problem as we have a couple of compatible lamp sockets, including the pendant luminaire over the table in the dining room and a bedside table lamp in the bedroom, so the bulbs were installed nice and simply.
The bulbs form a ZigBee wireless mesh network between themselves and the bridge, with the bridge bridging the ZigBee network to our home wired Ethernet LAN. So we plugged the bridge into our broadband router (actually, we've now connected a 4-port Ethernet hub to the router, and have the Honeywell Evohome gateway, the Philips Hue bridge, and an eQ3 HomeMatic gateway connected to the hub) and installed the Hue app on our Android tablet. One of the good things about the starter kit is that the bulbs and bridge are pre-paired, so when everything is powered up and the app is started the lamps are already registered and ready to go.
The standard Philips Hue app is pretty straight forward. We can control the brightness of each lamp manually, or we can set up and activate a 'scene', which is a stored configuration of brightnesses for each lamp. We've created scenes with the dining room light at full brightness for when I'm working from the dining table, and at a lesser brightness for when we're dining. The app also has the possibility to create 'alarms', which are time-based triggers to activate scenes. We've experimented with one that fades up the bedroom lamp in the morning over a 15 minute period, as assistance for the alarm clock.
The major issue that we've identified so far is that it is actually really inconvenient to fire up the tablet to turn a light on or off, and more often than not we've just turned the wall switch off and back on. This activates the Hue bulb's default behaviour, which is to turn on at full brightness. We're obviously not alone in this respect so we have a couple of dimmer switches on order, which should work in parallel with the app, and give us that physical switch on the wall to press.
There's another issue with the Hue app, in that it just seemed to crash randomly while I was trying various options. This turned out to be an issue with Android app permissions, but instead of displaying an alert to the user the app was just crashing. It is easy to resolve though, just go to Settings - Apps - Hue - Permissions and ensure all of the permissions are enabled.
So far we've been looking at white lamps. This is mainly due to cost. The white bulbs are about £15 each, whilst a multi-colour bulb is £50. With 25 ceiling lamps in the house (we've got ten GU10 downlighters in the kitchen alone!), we're not going to be installing multi-colour bulbs this side of a lottery win.
But we have taken a foray into multi-colour with a Hue go lamp. This connects into the ZigBee network, but is battery powered and portable, so we can move it around the house whilst we experiment. At the moment we've got it on the floor in the lounge and are using it to flood a wall with light. Movie nights now have a bit more ambience than before. I've also played with the geo-fencing feature of the Hue app, which can be used to trigger scenes on arrival or departure, so that the go lamp turns off when I leave the house, and back on when I come back. There's an option in the app to only enable this functionality after sunset, so I'm not turning lamps on and off during the day.
The next thing I want to play with is IFTTT integration, and see if I can use the go lamp for weather updates, email notifications, and more!
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