It has been a little while since I have purchased any new smart home products. I am still really into building out my smart home it just seems that there have not been any new products that have tempted me to pull the trigger.
Recently my wife and I were discussing putting some Christmas lights up on the house buy I really have no desire to be up and down a ladder to install the lights so I decided to do a little research and see whet was out there for smart outdoor smart products that we could use as Christmas lights. There are a few products out there but I kept coming back to Philips Hue. Specifically their Lily Outdoor Spotlights. It took me a couple months to pull the trigger on these due to the cost. The whole setup with the bridge and 5 lights cost me close to $600 and that was with the 2 extra lights on sale. Smart home enthusiasts seem to either love or hate Hue products, usually the hate come from the price as their products are really expensive. But they are very high quality and the Hue app is very good and easy to use.
One factor that helped me to justify the cost was that my front yard is very dark, we only have front door lights and a spotlight that we don't typically use as they are just dumb bulbs. These lights will provide some nice interest to the front of my house throughout the year as well as holidays when I want to change the colors. I can also start adding hue lights to different parts of my home as I see the need.
I do have various smart light bulbs around my home from a few different manufacturers. Mostly from promotions from my utility that a did not pay very much for. The downside is I have a few different apps to manage the lights and a couple times a year one of the drops off and I need to re-add it and remember which app to use. Kind of a pain. Now I can replace those with Hue lights as they die off.
What I was researching the Hue Lily spotlights I read a couple reviews where people were saying the lights weren't very bright for the price. Most of the photos that I found online seemed bright enough but there weren't a lot of examples out there. Philips also offers a larger/brighter spotlight called the Lily XL but I decided to just go with the standard version.
Setup
The base kit comes with 3 lights, a power supply, mounting hardware, ground spikes, cables and T connectors. I decided based on the look of the front of my home I needed 5 lights so I purchased two additional lights plus the smart hub. The power supply that comes with the base kit can support 5 lights so I am good there. The hub can support 50 lights so that should give me plenty of expansion in the coming years. Setup was pretty easy. Based on some other reviews I connected the lights together inside near the hub and then took the string of lights outside to stake in the ground. The lights and hardware seem to be pretty high quality. Very easy, took me about an hour and a half to unbox and setup. Hopefully they will last through our New England winters. Right now the cables are just laying on the ground. I will probably bury then in the spring when I mulch my harden beds.
The App
The app is one of the best features of the Hue system. It is very easy to add additional lights, setup zones and schedules. Most apps are not as intuitive as teh Hue app. You can also setup scenes that have different lighting themes based on your mood or the season (Golden Pond, Artic Aurora, Moonlight, etc). I setup a custom scene for Christmas with green and red lights. My kids were having a blast trying out all of the different scenes. There is a lot to teh app and I have not had time to fully explore it but I am looking forward to doing so in the coming months. Below is a couple examples of my setup with the Christmas and Bright scene. The lights aren't quite as bright as the photo shows, my iPhone night mode is doing some kind of magic. In real life they are a bit dimmer but still bright enough for me.
Overall I am pretty happy with my purchase, as expensive as it was it will be worth it to me as long as they last 5 or so years. My only concern is that I am going to spending a lot more money on additional hue lights throughout my home and yard.
