These are on the high side compared to rivals, but as long-time Hue users we’ve never had a single issue with build quality or longevity, and Hue’s sociability makes it really easy to add to and control with your smart home app or smart speaker. A Hue Play kit including HDMI sync box and a gradient light strip for a 55-inch TV is about $400/£390. Colour-changing table lamps are around $199/£189. A White and Colour starter kit with two colour changing bulbs, a Hue bridge and a smart light switch will currently set you back about $100/£110 a pair of white bulbs is about $20/£23, a pair of GU10 spotlight bulbs $60£60 and a pair of colour changing standard or candle bulbs around £80. That one’s particularly important because it’s a new standard that’s designed to get all smart home kit to talk to all other smart home kit without you having to worry if it wants a Google or an Apple or an Amazon device to talk to. With the Bridge installed, pretty much all of them: Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, IFTTT, Samsung SmartThings and the new Matter standard. What smart home systems is Hue compatible with? It then connects your Hue bulbs and devices to your network and unlocks all their power – such as syncing with Spotify or automatically running certain light scenes at certain times. This is sold in every Hue starter kit as well as separately, and it’s a little box that plugs into a spare port on your broadband router. However, for the fun stuff or to integrate with your existing smart home setup, you’ll need the Hue Bridge. To begin with, all you need is Wi-Fi or Bluetooth the latest generation of Hue bulbs will happily work without a hub and you can control them with the Hue app. In the past we’ve also used third party apps to create Hue lightning storms and spooky scenes for Halloween. We could use location services so our Hue lights turn on when we arrive home and turn off when we leave the Hue Sync app to make our lights pulse along with our music outdoor lights to wash our home with colour and provide mood lighting for social occasions replacement bulbs to turn our dull old kitchen downlighters into something more colourful and the IFTTT (If This Then That) app to create all kinds of exciting automations. Last but not least, we have one of the new Hue light strips to put on our Christmas tree so we have smart lighting for Santa too.Īnd that’s just scratching the surface. We also have a motion detector in the hallway that turns a light on if one of the kids is up and about in the middle of the night. We also have Hue lights in other rooms, so when we come home a cheery “I’m home!” lights our way from the front door to the living room, while a “turn the lights off everywhere” makes sure everything is dark when we go to bed. This is hands down our favourite Hue feature. All our consoles and TV devices are connected to that, so whatever is on-screen is passed through the Hue box so the light strip can match it. We also have a Hue Gradient Lightstrip on the back of our TV, connected to a Hue Play HDMI Sync box. We’ve also got an automation that turns some of the lights on at sunset. In our living room we have Hue bulbs in all the table lamps, floor lamps and hanging lamps, so we can change the mood of the room in a second with our voice assistant: “Hey Siri, turn the reading light on” or “Alexa, set the lights to Book Time”. We’ve invested pretty heavily in Hue lights so we’ll talk you through our setup. How can I use Hue smart lights in my home? Philips’ range of lights and bulbs is truly massive and getting larger almost by the week. But that said, it’s often the only option for those things. It’s one of the most expensive options for pretty much any kind of setup, whether that’s replacing your kitchen downlighters or extending the colours from your TV to fill your walls.
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