Over the weekend I splurged and bought a few of those fancy Philips Hue smart light bulbs with some of our tax refund.
And yes, before we get too far into this – I still think that they’re overly expensive…
…but they’re also undeniably really cool!
I ended up with two sets of lights – three of the color bulbs to update the ceiling fan in my office, and also a light strip to replace the cheap one I ran along the ledge in our living room that burned out about four weeks after I installed it.
All told, I spent about $250 … which I know is crazy for a handful of light bulbs!
(hint: Definitely shop around and pay attention to bundles for the best prices – I got a starter kit with 3 bulbs, the hub, and a switch for $120 that would normally cost $195 separately, whereas the two bulb and hub kit was $100 and the four bulb and hub kit was $200. Best Buy was also cheaper than Amazon for me.)
But so far I’m pretty impressed with their versatility and ease of use once I got the first one setup.
My biggest struggle was getting their hub installed, and to no real fault of Philips – turns out I didn’t have any empty ports left on my router, or outlets left on the nearby power strip, so I had to do some juggling there to hook up a new switch and swap out the power strip for one that better accommodates the bulky power supplies that way too many people still use.
Other than that, the only real setup pain was having to push the button on top of the hub to authenticate it with their app on my phone, which was only a pain because all of our networking stuff is on a high shelf in our bedroom closet, so I had to walk all the way across the house a couple of times to do it.
That said, from a security standpoint I kind of like that the Hue Hub requires a physical connection to your network rather than wifi because it’s a lot more secure than relying on customers to change the default password once they set it up, which would likely never happen.
So on to the lights themselves!
I mean, it’s still about 90% novelty, but I thought it was really neat to be able to change the colors of the lights in my office pretty much in real time just by moving my finger around the color map on my phone! I also like the preset scenes that you can pick from, although I wish that there were more of them. There might be a way to download more – I only spent a little time playing around with things in the Lab, but it looks like there’s a lot of experimentation to choose from as well as 3rd party apps that do animations and stuff, too.
I even let Christopher play with them for a few minutes and he thought it was pretty cool, too!
For my office, I’ve basically got the three color bulbs in my ceiling fan, and then I also have both a dimmer switch/remote thingy as well as a motion sensor linked to them. I’m still unsure on the switches because frankly, I don’t know where to put them where the kids won’t constantly steal them! But I thought the motion sensor was really cool because it actually let me not only set the lights to come on when I walk through the door, but also come on to different scenes based on the time of day!
Right now I have it set to normal lighting during the day and then a much dimmer, tropical scene of blue and green after 11pm.
I really want to experiment with trying out different types of lighting for when I’m writing late at night because I think it might be a cool way to help set the mood based on what it is that I’m trying to write!
That said, my other purchase was a light strip (and an extension) to go out in the living room – mostly to be used as ambient light on this ledge we have that runs the length of the room up by the ceiling. I think you’re supposed to put plants and stuff up there, but we’ve just got a couple of pots, a pillow, and a Mickey & Minnie statuette from when we got married. And also now some neato blue lights!
This is a lighting scheme that has evolved for a couple of years now. I first just had some white Christmas lights up there, which turned us on to the idea of having ambient lighting up there but unfortunately burned out after only a couple of weeks of 24×7 use. Next I picked up a much cheaper version of these lights from some random seller on Amazon, which were fine for the most part except that the remote was very finicky and almost never worked, and sometimes the colors flickered and had varying brightness.
For what it’s worth, I paid less than $20 for those and $120 for the new Philips lights.
I honestly think that I like these ones even more than the ones in my office because although I initially set them to a light blue just for some nice ambient light, I changed them to white later after Christopher had fallen asleep on the couch and was surprised that they let off enough light that I didn’t have to turn any of the others on to do any work while he was sleeping. That was a nice bonus that I hadn’t expected.
Now – for the future…
Again, even though these things are still pretty expensive – about $40 for a single bulb whereas I typically buy CFLs or their LED replacements for maybe $6 a piece – I’ve already found myself scoping out the next places around the house where I want to install them!
I think they’d be really great in the hallway at night to add a nightlight effect that we sort of have with our Nest smoke detectors, but not nearly as bright or versatile.
I want to update the ceiling fan in our bedroom just like my office to give us a change while sitting in bed getting ready to fall asleep.
They also just recently released some outdoor bulbs, including ones to go on the front corners of the garage which I think would be really cool, although I might have to upgrade our wifi first because I’m not sure if our existing AP’s range goes that far.
I mean, sure, to do the entire house all at once would just be ridiculous. I think I counted up the other day and found a total of about 50 bulbs around my house, so that’s $2,000 in light bulbs right there and that doesn’t even include switches and sensors and stuff! But if you were to do it maybe a room at a time, I think that’s a lot more manageable, plus it gives me some time to work out the kinks like figuring out the best way to handle switches so that they don’t end up walking away on us.
Eventually I’d love to get to the point where everything is switched over, including adding some accent lighting around the garden out front and the pool area in the back. In theory it’d be neat to then start to tie some of these things together – i.e. turn on the hot tub, set the lights, turn on some music, and pour me a drink…
Ok, maybe not that last one just yet, but the future is right around the corner! 
