Hi everyone,
I would like to share my feedback regarding WiZ light bulbs, specifically around Matter.
For context, I’m from Europe and since WiZ bulbs are one of the few that are RGBW, are CRI 90, on Gu10 format and Matter compatible, I decided to give a try.
Since then, I’ve also purchased a Nous P8 and a Ledvance (Zigbee though).
The WiZ bulbs are a bit of a nightmare to understand what model they are, but on the box, the bulbs are WiZ Wi-Fi BLE 50" Gu10 922-65 RGB (WiZ 9290024484AW).
In summary, my experience with the WiZ bulbs was:
- When powered for the first time, it went into pairing mode automatically.
- It honors the Power Off/On 3 times to put it into pairing mode again.
- The paring with Google app was very spotty, due to Google creating keys and such in the cloud, which would often bug out and require me to wait 24h.
- Pairing directly to Home Assist with the usage of a Bluetooth adapter, was flawless and very fast.
- Under Home Assistant, these bulbs will have:
- Bulb reports “Firmware: V1.0” and “Hardware: V1.0” even though this is incorrect, it’s just hard coded values, as the bulbs are on Firmware 1.33.0 (had to use their app to see this).
- A Light Entity with the generic RGB CCT controls and no effects. (On the App, the bulb supports over 20 or 30 effects, the same can be see with the WiZ integration)
- Configurations:
- “Off transition time” = 0.0
- “On level” = 254
- “On transition time” = 0.0
- “On/Off transition time” = 0.0
- "Power-on behavior on Startup
The issues started when I noticed that not everything works.
For example, the bulbs came from the factory with a turn off transition set to around 4 seconds, which was annoying.
Than to make matters worse, NONE of the configurations work, I mean not a single one, with the worst offender being “Power-on behavior on Startup”, as such, if you have a power outage, get ready to have all your bulbs on in max brightness.
From some research, I found that these bulbs are actually Matter 1.0 certified, so I decided to give them a chance and reach out to support.
I’ve been in talks with them since August 22nd and after around 20 emails back and forth I give up as the results are not good.
Key points from WiZ support:
- They have no clue what Matter is or how it works.
- They insist on your having the bulbs paired to their App (which grants them remote control, even if you don’t have an account. The App generates a “Home ID”, which allows it to work without an account and being controlled over the internet.).
- They refused into reporting the issue to their engineering team and have the issue fixed.
- They failed to understand that you don’t need their App to pair a Matter device.
Here is the last claim by them:
All this to say, that I even though WiZ color quality is pretty good, their Matter is integration is clearly a rushed mess just to have the badge on the box and not taken seriously.
As such, I can’t recommend them at all.