I am a dabbler in home automation and thinking about starting to get into lighting. I have heard mostly good things about the Philip Hue line and wanted to see what peoples thoughts are about it.
Our main current automation are a large number of Google Smart Speaker and Arlo video doorbells. Everything is working now on the Google ecosystem which I think Philip Hue will connect with. Our house is 100 years old which means that our possibilities to automate are lower than a new home since we have very few overhead lights, power outlets are at a premium (we have lots of power strips running through the house).
We are thinking about doing smart bulbs in some lamps which we can leave on and a chandalier. I think the biggest issue will leaving things always powered on.
I used them mainly for 5+ years, they work pretty well, they definitely don’t last forever like most LED bulbs claim.
The biggest problem I ran into was other people, even my wife would still flip switches off which made them kind of pointless.
They work good in lamps but as far as places with obvious switches go, I would get smart switches instead.
I am a little concerned about flipping the physical switches that make them useless. I will have to figure out what to do with smart switches for our chandelier
We just glued the magnetic holding frames the remotes come with next to the wall switch. Also the bulbs are set to stay off when being energised so everybody has to use them.
I had a couple TP-link wifi switches at my old house and never really ran into problems.
My plan is to implement ZigBee at our new house, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.