Philips Hue White and Color Starter Kit + 2 Echo Dots (Black)

I. Am. So. In. Love. We paired these up with our Alexa and alternate between utilizing it through voice commands and the Philips Hue app. The color ambiance lights are MUCH more useful than the white ones. We like to adjust the lighting in the room to red if we’re working on things at night, but I’ve found it works best on 10% brightness when we’re watching a horror film so we can see, without damaging out night vision, around the room if we have to grab a drink or something. Typically we would put the white filter on at 3%. That’s the joy of these lights, you can pick whatever color and intensity in addition to setting up routines. I wake up easily to lights, so the bedroom lamp is set to gradually illuminate until it reaches full intensity by 8 am to help me wake up without an alarm. They also can be set to routines while you’re on travel or remotely activated through either the Alexa app or the Hue app to maintain the illusion of someone being home. These are much better than the wall plugin timers that activate your lamps or tv while you’re gone.

You have the ability to also utilize the Google Assistant App, though I have not used it. Instead, I’ve used Apple’s Home Kit to set up scenarios for how the lights should respond to my presence. Keep in mind, this does not work well for multiple people, there seems to be an issue with it. Therefore, we use the Alexa or Hue app most.

So much fun! Warning: you need to have a little bit of patience if these don’t hook up to your WiFi immidiately. They WILL work. Do yourself a favor, write down serial numbers before you plug them into lamps and get started. If they’re not found automatically, use the serial number trick and it will work. Take your time. Remember to use the Hue app for setup, then let the Alexa app discover all your new bulbs, and soon you’ll be sitting on the couch barking out colors and lights to Alexa!

Very pricey to get the whole house up and running, but worth it in the end!

I got this as a package deal with the Amazon Echo ($188). This is my second kit, and I love these lights (my wife thinks they’re unnecessary…oh well.) I got the first kit (just lights and bridge) for $139. There’s lots of cool apps (many of which must be purchased) to do fun things with the lights. Thunderstorm and Firework scenes are fun.

It was nice that I got two bridges, because my lights were starting to randomly flash, so I swapped the hubs. This was my first time programming with Alexa, Philips Hue bulbs, and a Smarththings hub, so the problem could have been mine. Still, it was nice having a second hub just in case.

Keep in mind, the bulbs are already set up to work with each hub. If you get another set, you can combine bulbs from different sets. Being the perfectionist that I can with technical stuff, I did factory resets of both hubs for installation reasons. The bridge allows you to rename the bulbs, but each is given a hard number in the order that they are added if you reset the hub (1. ****, 2. **** ). I wasn’t to thrilled with this, but it wouldn’t affect most (normal) people. 😀

The most advanced colored and white light system ever, and it does impress! Sure, there’s a little bit of learning curve in setting it up and configuring. Usually it’s a breeze. Just plug the hub into the router, press the button and then wait for the thing to connect to all of your lights. Using the Phillips app you then assign lights and rooms. All that went exactly as planned. Once I tried to add the Phillips plug-in to my Google Home Mini, it adds perfectly fine, but then still wasn’t working with voice commands at first. So I dug around the internet and found that people were having the same problem. They said that they figured out that if you have somebody else sharing and linked to your Google Home Mini, they too must have their Phillips app linked properly with their Google Home app on their Android device. So just repeat the process as you did for yourself and voila! Lights on presto! The system is imperfect and prone to minor issues such as occasional linking imperfections, and occasionally the Google Home won’t work seldomly. But really, this thing is pretty damn awesome! You can watch Star Wars in red and blue for example! It works both with the Phillips app and using voice commands partnered with the Google Home and Amazon Alexa devices. But it’s not necessary to work, if you just want to use it without voice commands. But if you do decide to, it’s a very inexpensive addition considering the Google Home Mini’s and Amazon Echo’s are going for $29. The beautiful thing is that there’s barely any configuration involved, and not a lot of training for it to work well with turning on and off the lights, changing colors, etc. If you got some disposable income or just a strong love of changing the mood, I’d say it’s a fun investment. Lights are rated for 15000 hours or up to 15 years, whichever comes first, and I even read it can help some people who get winter blahs and SAD. So check them out, we’re having a ball! I hear you can sync it with music and movies as well. I’m going to go learn more about that! Have a nice day!