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Comment by gjstein | Hacker News Reader

Philips Hue lights. I had wanted them for a little while for the novelty of it, but upon buying a couple my wife and I converted nearly all of our small apartment (except the bathrooms) to use their color-changing bulbs. Being able to change the light color and temperature has been surprisingly nice and has made our home much "cozier" under quarantine. We change the lights to dim reds and blues during movie nights or when we exercise or do yoga. It was a somewhat expensive shift, though I'd happily do it again. Being able to use Siri via our phones to control the lights by voice is also convenient as we head off to bed (as the light switches are across the room).

[Others have also said AirPods Pro. Spectacular little earbuds.]

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My roommate changed all our bulbs to Philips Hue. The connectivity was really nice at first but they are so dim! It completely changed the mood of the flat at night.

I'd advise people to check their current bulbs and make sure the lumen rating is the same before replacing them, if I recall correctly most connected bulbs are around 1000-1200 lumens, and top out at 1600.

Dim? The Hue bulbs I used were a lot brighter than the 'dumb' bulbs I replaced. This was a couple of years ago (before they had Bluetooth), not sure if they've changed the specs in the meantime.

It depends what you start out with of course, if you had low wattage incandescent bulbs for example you can replace them just fine with connected ones.

But currently, commercially available dumb bulbs go into much higher lumen ranges than connected ones. Ours were in the 2600-3000 lumens range before the change if I recall correctly.

> Ours were in the 2600-3000 lumens range before the change if I recall correctly.

Wow, that's very bright! IIRC ours were standard CFL's you'd buy at any store at the time (at least here in the Netherlands), but definitely nothing in the range you're stating.

The good thing about wireless lights is you can get a lot of them in different fixtures without needing to run cables to switches.

I much prefer having an even light around the whole room rather than a couple bright ceiling lamps.

I bought a few of them to try them out and I'm disappointed currently. I tried to make them switch temperature automatically through the day, and nothing is working. I've only found people saying that there's no way without custom scripts that attempt to change the temperature continuously, which is very surprising. (I've only done an hour of research and tried around 3 different methods).

Only one of the lights, which uses a dimmer switch, changes automatically, but only if I turn it off and on again.

Other than that, the quality of the light is good.

I've had my Hue setup change through 4 color schemes based on sunrise/sunset and time of day for a good few years now.

I'm not aware of any automagic way to achieve this result. You'll need to use all4hue, which is basically a wrapper app around the Hue API, to set up rules by hand.

Basically, you'll have a set of rules which update a variable based on the time of day. Then use this variable as a condition in every rule that turns on a light, and have another set of rules triggered by changes to this variable when a light is on. Not complicated, just tedious to program as you'll need 4 rules per light(group) for each of these categories.

But the results work with lights that stay on, lights turned on by dimmers, as well as with motion sensors. And most importantly, the entire thing runs on the bridge so no HomeKit needed. Well worth the effort IMO.

Tis true. I use HomeAssistant with the f.lux plugin to do this, which wasn't too much work as I already used HomeAssistant.

Definitely a lot to set up though.

The latest version of iOS/HomeKit has 'adaptive lighting'. You select that colour option and it will modify the temperature automatically throughout the day. You have very little manual control over it but sounds like what you might be looking for.

I recommend the Home Depot phillips color-changing lights instead. They're way cheaper, only like $20 per bulb. I love them because they're way brighter than most light bulbs but dimmable, let you choose a traditional color temperature, or let you do some fun colors. I don't use home assistants and using the Wiz app is fine.

I agree with this. I put Hue light bulbs in almost all of my rooms and a strip on my porch. I set them up with HomeKit and now I always come home to my lights on and they turn off automatically when they leave the house. I use the automatic color changing by time of day built-in to HomeKit and it definitely helps with warm colors at night but brighter and cooler during the day. And everything essentially has a dimmer now. And being able to control the lights from my phone or with voice commands is super convenient. I've got the full color lights, but realistically I really only need the shades of white and HomeKit connectivity to use the features that I regularly use.

In shops near me I can buy now pretty cheap led ceiling/wall lamps that come with a remote. You can change intensity and light temperature, but there are also full RGB models. I like it that it's dumb otherwise.

It’s nice but it quickly becomes gimmicky I found (besides the ability to easily say “hey google turn off the lights”)

I've had smart lights for a few years now, and I'm pretty happy with them. I can turn them off remotely, dim them as a group and change them to a soft red at night to not blind myself.

Of course this quickly escalated to maintaining a full blown Home Assistant installation...

Similarly, I've been putting Lutron Caseta smart switches on some of my more frequently used light switches, and I use the convenience of turning the lights on or off from the couch or bed _way_ more than I thought I would.

Some people need to beware of the 1000 Hz PWM on the Hue bulbs

why

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