Philips Hue Wireless Lighting Starter Kit Review

When it comes to smart homes there are various key components, including lighting, smart locks and voice control. The idea of a smart home isn’t something for lazy people, it’s to enhance your life and the way your home works. The Philips Hue system certainly does that!

Smart lighting has many benefits including being able to set mood lighting, turn lights on and off from your smartphone or through voice control via an Amazon Echo or Google Home. But a real plus for it is the security benefit, you can set schedules, power lights on from anywhere in the world or react to situations with pre-programmed events.

Philips Hue Wireless Lighting Starter Kit Review

In this review, we are going to take a look at the Philips Hue Wireless Lighting Starter Kit. Whilst Philips is one of the more pricey manufacturers of smart lighting systems, it is definitely also one of the best.

We also take a look at the Philips smart motion sensor. This isn’t essential but really do add value.

Manufacturers specs

• Average life: 25,000 hours
• Wattage: 10w
• Type of bulb: LED
• Colour range: 16 million colours

Features of the Philips Hue wireless lighting

Smart lighting at the outset sounds lazy and an unnecessary expense! But what a difference it can make to a home from so many different perspectives.

Firstly, it looks great, if you are putting these bulbs in when your house is being rewired, they negate the need for light switches. Giving a much cleaner look, but if they are an addition, they look great too, offering mood lighting and reactive lighting.

You can be set there and think I would prefer a warmer colour, or a brighter colour, the Philips Hue system offers over 2 million colours to choose from!

The other thing that I use and really like is I have it set to react to films and music, so positioned behind your TV it reacts with the mood of what is happening on screen, adding a deeper and more immersive experience to watching a film with your family.

The Philips Hue starter set comes with 3 of the 10w E27 bulbs, a bridge that allows you to connect all of your Philips Hue smart home accessories to your router and in the newer version of the kit (the one that is mentioned in this review) it also includes the wireless dimmer switch.

Personally, I like how Philips give you options. For example, the lighting can be controlled via your smartphone/tablet/computer from anywhere in the world or the convenience of your sofa. But then what if you don’t have a smartphone to hand and want to operate the lights? There is the wireless dimmer switch that they have included. This is magnetic and fastens to its bracket on the wall, but can also be removed and taken around the house with you. But then let’s say that you are behind the TV trying to find something, no smartphone in your hand and the remote is on the other side of the room? Philips have included full support for digital assistants such as the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple Home Kit.

Whatever your lighting requirements are Philips have you covered. There are also the addon kits that you can get such as the strip lighting, these are all fully compatible and integrate well with the Hue kit.

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What’s is in the box?

• 3x 10w E27 bulbs
• Philips Hue Bridge
• Dimming light switch

Unboxing

Upon opening your Philips Hue Lighting starter kit, you will find 3 10w E27 bulbs, these have become the standard sized bulb throughout Europe in the past few years. Although they are only 10w, making them ultra-low power consumption, thanks to being LED they are amazingly bright!

The bulbs can be used in one room to create mood, ambient and main stage lighting or spread around your home as the central light in each room. Thanks to the app you can control them independently or together.

There is also the Philips Hue Bridge, this is the intelligence behind the Phillips smart home ecosystem. This integrates seamlessly with your home broadband router to allow your smart home to be accessed from the comfort of your home, either through the app or digital assistants. Also wherever you are in the world!

Finally, the kit includes the wireless dimmer switch. This handy bit of kit is magnetic and fastens to the wall via the included bracket. Allowing full control of the lights including dimming functionality. This can be used in place of a traditional light switch on the wall, but requires no wires! It can also be removed from its magnetic base station to provide wireless control of your lighting from the comfort of your armchair.

Controlling the Philips Hue wireless lighting

As I have mentioned above, there are various means of controlling your Philips Hue system.

It comes with a native app that works seamlessly, but it can also be integrated into many home automation systems to bring greater control over your full smart home. If you have an existing setup or want to take the smart home theme to the next level, you may be considering things such as the Hive digital thermostat or devices that allow you to control your curtains and blinds. The Philips Hue system can integrate easily into such software systems.

There is also with this newer model the ability to integrate with a wide range of digital assistants, including Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple Home Pod. Personally, we feel the Amazon Echo brings the greatest amount of functionality to the Philips Hue lighting system, but all are supported and work well.

The included wireless dimmer switch as mentioned above is a great addition and allows for interaction with your smart lighting system even if you don’t have your phone with you or your digital assistant isn’t present.

Philips Hue Smart Motion Sensor

One other nice accessory we like from Philips, that we feel integrates really well is the smart motion sensor, as seen to the left.

This little device works really well, so as someone enters a room and passes the sensor it can be set to trigger a bulb or range of bulbs. This can be ceiling or wall mounted and is wireless.

What we also like about this is that it can be time driven, so for example only set to work at night times and when it does only bring the lighting on dim.

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Product Gallery

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Positives and negatives

The Philips Hue Smart Bulb Starter Set is a premium offering, but you do get what you pay for. There are positives and negatives to the product, we take a look below.

Positives

• Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri integration.
• Easy to install and use.
• Comes with 3 bulbs.
• Scalable

Negatives

• Expensive per bulb

Conclusion

Is the Philips Hue smart bulb starter kit the best smart home kit available? When it comes to bulbs and lighting probably! There are much cheaper solutions available with regard to smart lighting, but unfortunately many are just that, cheap! The Philips Hue kit is very good quality as you would expect from a brand like Philips and they have got you covered with everything you could think of when it comes to smart home lighting.

The functionality and implementation of the technology are very good and we would highly recommend this kit. The fact that it integrates well with other manufacturers smart home kit is an even bigger bonus.