Hi,
I am thinking about purchasing some smart light bulds and strips to use in specific locations around my house. I would appreciate some input around technology and product choices if you don’t mind?
How does xaomi yeelight relate to xaomi Aqara?
How good is the Aqara bridge? Is it worth it?
Should I be looking at other smart bulb options, such as LiFX?
Do different vendors lightstrips enable different functionality? Or are they all much the same?
Is Philips Hue a waste of money?
As you may infer from this list I’m motivated by value for money but will pay more for justifiable functionalit. I use hass.io and have alexa cloud enabled. Xaomi attracts me because of the range of sensors and other devices it also makes available. However, I’m unsure what pitfalls may lie down that road. Also, responsiveness of the bulbs is also important as they’d need to meet the expectations of my family.
Oh, such a loaded question.
Ask 100 Home Assistant users their preference, and you will get 101 different answers. (Because in the time it took to get 99 answers, someone has already changed their mind).
I can only speak from my own experience.
Remember, this is based on MY experience and prejudices.
Hubs suck.
Cloud sucks more than hubs.
I have little experience with Xaomi devices and I haven’t gotten them to work with Home Assistant, but honestly I haven’t had time to troubleshoot them.
Ikea Tradfri lights- Love them and hate them. When they work they work great. When they don’t work, it’s usually fixed by rebooting the hub. I hate using hubs. It integrates easily with Alexa, but not as straightforward with Home Assistant.
Smart Lights. Why? True, they are LED lamps and should last for ten years or more, but why put a WiFi or XBee receiver in each one of them, and then require a hub for each type of light or outlet strip. I prefer the smarts to be in the switch that controls the lights. $15 to $30 per light plus a proprietary hub, last time I looked they are approaching $100, just doesn’t compare to a Z-wave switch, my own hub (the Aeomi Z-Stick) and $5 lights. Even cheaper are the Sonoff MQTT switches.
Phillips hue. Again, why? My Tradfri lights can change color, but I’ve never changed it from the “cool white” since they were installed. Do I want to spend upwards of $150 to be able to change the color of lights- because I can??
Z-Wave. About half the lights around my home are on Z-Wave switches. They have been about 95% uptime reliable. I use the Aeotec Z-Stick as the required hub. Z-Wave has some illogical quirks, but once you understand them it’s no big deal. I am a fan of Inovelli Z-Wave switches because most of my lighting circuits are three-way. With GE switches you have to use the $20 GE slave switch in a three-way circuit. With Inovelli, you can use the existing slave switches.
MQTT. My favorite protocol. Mostly because I am in complete control. I have home-built sensors all over the place based on ESP8266 modules. When I discovered Tasmota firmware for the ESP devices, it was like getting on the freeway. Project development time was reduced significantly. I also have a bunch of Sonoff switches and relays that were easy to flash the Tasmota firmware. Sometimes I want to do something that Tasmota doesn’t accommodate, so I write my own code in the Arduino IDE then flash it to the ESP device.
I do not like using clouds, but with Alexa, I really don’t have a choice because of the immense computing power needed to do voice-recognition. Again, when it works, it works great. (For some reason Alexa just can’t get my wife’s name (Kim) right). I’ve never tried Google Voice but there a few people on this forum who do.
As I said, there is no answer to your question as everyone’s skill level and personal experience will be different from everyone else’s.
Hi,
Thanks for the reply. I understand your point about ranges of opinion which is why I tried to be relatively specific with my questions.
Like you, I favour control at the switch. I’m also anti-hub so need to justify any moves in that regard very carefully.
This query re: smart bulbs and strips is for specific use cases - point solutions you might say. However, good levels of information on the relative technical strength, implementation, integration and usage of different bulb ranges seems hard to come by.
As a simpleton I just have cheap chinese smart lights, two bulbs that are controlled by tuya and a couple of sonoff slamphers (my first smart purchase)
Sonoff devices can be flashed so, I believe, they don’t need to use the cloud but I don’t have the skills to do that so am still connecting to their cloud, and tuya devices also have to use the cloud. Not ideal but cheap. I don’t have any hubs, just my raspary pi 3 running hassio.
I’ve not used alexa but use google home to voice countrol my lights as well as other devices.
These were my first smart purchase. Yes they are expensive. Yes the colour ability is not really useful unless you do lots of mood lighting or teenage parties. Then again they also do white bulbs, so you don’t need to get the more expensive colour ones. What is best about them though is that they just work. I have never had a problem with them in 4 or 5 years. There is a hub, but it is unobtrusive and juast works through power cuts, updating HA etc. If the hub craps out I will move them to zigbee2mqtt. In short, they are great, but I look for cheaper options.
At $10 each wifi lights are not much more than led bulbs really. They work well with AiLight firmware, but are flaky after a power cut, mainly (I think) because they boot before the dhcp server. Their colour temp for white are awful, cool white and if you set to warm it is just a horrible cool white with a bit of orange. Still they prevent me from stubbing my toe on the way to the bathroom in the night. No hub required, I have wifi in the house already. I hear what you say about the smarts in the switch, that is my preference too. However I have some 5 gang switches, and a lot of two or three way switches.
So you do use a hub!
and 95% is not that great, plus z-wave is expensive, and not standardised throughout the world (different frequencies in different continents makes for a split market and high prices)
