Philips Hue Spotlight and Outdoor Motion Detector

 

I have an old spotlight above my drive way that we never use because the switch is in the garage and it is not on a motion sensor.  I have always planned to replace it with a motion sensor light but it is about 25 feet above the ground and I really don't like working on ladders that high anymore.  It also uses 100 watt incandescent bulbs which are extremely inefficient so I was hoping to switch to LED technology.

As I was looking through Philips Hue product lines I found that they have some outdoor rated LED spotlights that are only 13 Watts so that solves the efficiency issue.  I was hoping I could build an Amazon Alexa routine that triggered off motion on my Arlo security cameras which is possible but I could not find a way to have the lights trigger only at night.

Fortunately Philips Hue sells an outdoor motion sensor that does exactly what I need.  Setup was fairly easy as it is with all hue products.  The only confusing thing is I needed to setup the scene for turning the light on and off based on motion through the motion detector itself, not the lights.  Once I had that figured out it was pretty easy.  The only thing I am not sure about is I needed to set a time for nighttime behavior but I want the light to come on only when it is dark and that will change throughout the year I am not sure if that will need adjusting.  The motion sensor is set to only trigger when it is actually dark out so the time range seems to be redundant.  Just something to keep an eye on throughout the year.  So far they have been working flawlessly.

The only complaint I have heard about the motion sensor is that you cannot or it is very difficult to replace that battery.  That is pretty unfortunate for a $50 product, hopefully it lasts at least a couple years and by then they may have a new motion sensor with additional features.   The sensor does have a thermostat built in which I am not too sure what to do with.   I guess you could run some automations based on temperature but I can't think of a good use case for it.  The weird thing is I can't find the temperature anywhere in the Hue app.  It only shows in Apple Home, which I rarely use.  Apple Home may be something I need to dig in and learn about at some point as it seems some smart products only integrate there.

Overall I am pretty happy with this solution.  It is a bit pricey but that is what you get when you go with Hue products

 

Philips Hue Lily Outdoor Spotlights

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.

WIFI Smart Plug

 

I think every smart home enthusiast has dreams of a home where every light, appliance or fixture is somehow connected to the internet and can be turned on or off with the swipe of a finger on a smart phone or a wake word on a digital assistant.  The reality is, for most of us, it is still way too expensive to retrofit our homes with all of the tech.  The other issue is this technology is in its infancy so 5 years from now there will be new and better products so too big of an investment early may not be too smart.

There are ways to accomplish this dream.  We have smart bulbs, but at $10 a bulb minimum it can still get pretty pricey to outfit a whole house.  I have at least 120 light bulbs in my home not including outside lights and can lights.  By replacing all of them I would not gain any cost savings and the convenience gain is not worth the money for me.   The next logical step would be smart plug.  These smart outlets plug into your wall outlet and can be controlled by an app, a timer or a digital assistant.  You could also plug a power strip into the smart plug and control a group of appliances.  But again, to outfit a whole house with these to me is not cost effective given the price of around $20 per plug.

I have always been intrigued by these smart plugs but never had an obvious use case for just one of them so I held off on purchasing any.  Then my electric utility had one of their promotions where I could purchase 10 60 watt equivalent LED bulbs and get a free Linksio Smart Plug.  So I pulled the trigger.  I have never heard of the company Linksio and they don't even sell their products on Amazon but the product seems to be identical to many of the smart plugs from WEMO, Amazon and other manufacturers, and the price was right.  Most of these smart plugs work with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and IFTTT.

After setting up my smart plug I was able to synch it with Alexa so I can ask her to turn on/off the plug which was pretty cool but I was still at a loss of where to use the plug.  I plugged my home entertainment center power strip into it thinking I would use the smart switch to turn off all of my electronics components and save some money on the phantom power usage but soon realized that my cable box has a five minute power on boot so that wouldn't work for my family.   So my smart plug stayed on until the holidays when I finally had a use case.  My Christmas tree, in order to turn off the lights I need to bend down and crawl under the tree to unplug it.  Now all I have to say is Alexa, turn on/off the Christmas tree.   Is that worth $20?  Maybe, for the cool factor and impressing friends.

The one other useful feature that many of these smart plugs offer is energy monitoring.   So whatever is plugged into the smart outlet can be monitored and you can see how many watts it is using in real time and by month and year. So I can see my Christmas tree lights are using 19.8 watts and my home entertainment components were using over 100 watts.  I probably won't be purchasing any more smart plugs anytime soon but it will be useful around the holidays and if I ever need to determine how much electricity an appliance is using I am set.

FEIT Smart WIFI Color bulb

I have been wanting to add some color smart lights to my home for the past couple years but I just can't justify the cost that some of the major manufacturers are charging for their bulbs.  Both Philips Hue and LIFX are upwards of $40 per bulb and with Philips Hue you also need to buy a hub.  I have well over 100 bulbs in my house which I recently upgraded to LED so the cost to replace them all would be astronomical.  So I decided to wait until the price comes down or until I find a real use case for the bulbs.  Then last month my electric utility, National Grid has a promotion where if I bought 8 led bulbs from them for $10, I would also get a FEIT Electric Smart WIFI color bulb.  This was a no brainer for me, I bought 2 of the promotional packages and got 16 regular LEDs and 2 color smart bulbs for $20!!  You can purchase one FEIT Smart WIFI color bulb on Amazon for under $20 which is half the price of the other color smart bulb manufacturers.

      

For basically free color smart lights I did not expect these light to have the functionality of Hue or LIFX but I have to say I am pretty impressed with these lights.   The lights are very bright and the colors are pretty close to what I would expect of reds greens and blues.  On the non color settings you change the temperature from warn to cool and they are dimmable as well.

The FEIT Electric app is just ok.  Again, I wasn't expecting much for the price of the bulbs but the basic functionality is there.  You can group the lights, change colors, temperature or dim the lights.  There is a basic on/off timer but unfortunately no dusk/dawn timer so if you plan to use them as outdoor lighting you will have to change the timer every few months to keep up with the changing sunset/sunrise.  I couldn't find any information from the manufacturer about using these bulbs outside but their Amazon page says they are damp rated and can be used in enclosed fixtures.

 I have both of my bulbs installed in outdoor covered fixtures.  I decided to use them as Christmas lights so one is red and one is green.  I truly expected them to die in a couple days outside in our cold New England climate but they have been faithfully been turning on and off using the timer for a couple weeks now.  I will probably switch them back to regular white lights after the holiday.

Setup was fairly straightforward.  Install the app, register and then discover the lights.  I had to go through discovery process twice with each light but eventually it worked for me.  I do consider myself to be pretty technically savvy and I don't mind tinkering with tech As I mentioned earlier the app has very basic functionality.  No synching with music or scenes like the other expensive manufacturers.  Also it does not work with IFTTT so no getting the bulbs to work with other smart devices, kind of a disappointment as this would add to the functionality, maybe sometime in the future.  My only other hope would be that they will add a dusk/dawn timer as that seems like it would be a pretty simple software update.

They also work with Amazon Alexa and Google assistant.  I have only tried using Alexa but it seems to work just fine.  Just tell Alexa to turn the lights on or off or to change the color and she does it.  My eleven year old daughter has already asked for one of these bulbs for her room and for under $20 I just may purchase a couple for her and my son's rooms.   Overall great smart color WIFI lights for the price.