Dispel those dark winter hues with controllable coloured lightbulbs from LIFX
I'm not sure about you, but coloured lighting in my home isn’t a high priority. However, many people do like to alter their mood chromatically, and for them LIFX has created the 1000 Color Smart Bulb.
For those following the smart home device trail, Philips got into this market earlier with its Hue bulb range, but in almost every respect the LIFX 1000 series is superior. Where the Philips Hue needs an associated hub to be networked, LIFX bulb offers self-contained wi-fi, reducing the cost of a single bulb installation.
LIFX made some earlier 800 series designs, and this product represents its second generation, delivering greater brightness and functionality.
To get it operational, you simply screw it into a socket, access its own wi-fi access point using a phone or tablet. And then you give it your email credentials and access your router to complete the connections.
I had some minor issues with this part. LIFX’s Android app insisted I first turn off the ‘Avoid poor wi-fi’ feature. That hasn’t been in Android since KitKat if I’m not mistaken, and it wasn’t a feature on Marshmallow.
After a few attempts, it all worked, and once the bulb was logged against the LIFX with between whatever other cloud account, I got control across a range of devices. You can have more than one bulb under the same account, and you can group them based on named locations.
Control is via a phone or tablet app (Android or iOS), an Apple or Android wearable or even through a Windows 10 PC using a Universal App for that platform.
But what’s really cool is that once you’ve got the LIFX app on your device, you can even control it with your voice using Google Now, Siri or Cortana.
At least that’s the theory. I had some success calling the Life X app directly from Google Now, but more general statements like “Okay, Google, set my lights to blue”, didn’t work for me. They should, and I suspect they will with some work on my part.
Should you have more success, the range of commands available is impressive. Along with turning on and off, and asking for specific colours and themes, you can also brighten and darken, all by voice. It also supports Amazon Echo.
Personally, I found the official Android app easier to use, and it has all manner of controls for colour cycling, and even themes for specific uses, like watching movies.
At the simplest level, this is an LED light that you can control the brightness of and which can output a maximum equivalent of an old 75W lightbulb or 1055 lumens, while only using 11W at full brightness.
The wonders of LED technology know no bounds, and it can also generate a very wide range of colours from aqua blues and verdant greens to zippy reds and even deep Trump orange. The colour temperature range starts at 2500K and goes up to 9000K.
Colour representation is a major improvement over the Philips Hue, because despite the name, those bulbs don’t do some specific colours well at all.
Like the Hue, the LIFX can also be linked into IFTTT recipes, linking its features to other IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Doing this make the bulb flash to music or change colour when the heating comes on – or whatever convoluted craziness you can come up IoT devices you own and user definable events.
One nice example I tried was to make the light glow orange precisely at sunset, rather than at a hardwired set time each day.
I have only a few reservations about the bulb, one being its weight. At 240g this is much heavier than a typical lightbulb, and it might pull on wiring that isn’t sufficiently secured. The shape is also fatter that a typical bulb at the base, and that might interfere with some fittings.
The review bulb came as an E27 screw design, but LIFX also makes this bulb in a more UK-house-friendly B22 bayonet edition.
The use of 2.4GHz frequency range to communicate does make it clash with a few commonly used appliances, and amusingly LIFX’s FAQ tells you to place it 25ft away from a microwave or cordless phone. That would be the neighbour’s house for me and most people in the UK, realistically.
The cost, as they say, is the cost. But I find it depressing that it's just $60 in the USA for an almost identical product. Whatever you pay, these aren’t bulbs you’ll be replacing yearly, because based on three hours a day of usage, the life expectancy is an impressive 22.8 years.
If you can stomach the cost or have a friend stateside, then the LIFX 1000 is definitely the smart bulb to have right now, and it's significantly better than other controllable colour LEDs I’ve seen. Mark Pickavance
The best colour smart LED bulbs yet.