With White Ambiance, you start to move into what Hue’s all about. These are the cheapest Hue bulbs available and are a good choice if you just want smart dimming and don’t care about temperature-changing or colour-changing models.īuy Now: Philips Hue White bulbs B22 white Single at Amazon from £14.99 / $25īuy Now: Philips Hue White bulbs B22 white Twin at Amazon from £22 / $44īuy Now: Philips Hue White bulbs E27 white Single at Amazon from £11 / $29īuy Now: Philips Hue White bulbs E27 white Twin at Amazon from £22.49 / $50 Philips Hue White Ambiance The bulbs offer a warm white (2700K) light, just like traditional bulbs. For the best experience, you should buy the bridge.īuy Now: Philips Hue Bridge at Amazon from £44 / $51 Philips Hue White bulbsĪvailable in B22 (Bayonet) and E27 (Edison Screw), the Philips Hue White bulbs are a straight swap for an existing dimmable light bulb. Plus, the Echo Plus doesn’t support any of the Hue accessories, such as the motion sensor or dimmer switch. However, you get only basic control over brightness and colour, and miss out on scene control. Hue bulbs can also be paired directly with the Amazon Echo Plus. This allows wireless control of the lights, but you lose out on more advanced features such as configuring scenes or remotely triggering your lights. A new starter kit ships with a dimmer switch pre-paired with it. Amazon Alexa and Google Home support are available with either the new or old bridges. Standalone, the bridge is only worth buying if you have the old model and want to upgrade to add Apple HomeKit Support. The current version can be bought for £49.99 standalone, but it works out cheaper if you buy one of the starter kits. If you’d like app or voice control, then you’ll need the Hue Bridge. The full Philips Hue review explains how good the system is, but here we’re looking at the specific options for the Philips Hue bulb types including starter kits, multi-packs and the available accessories. This is also what makes the Hue app such a great addition to the physical hardware system.Philips Hue is the best-stocked smart lighting company, with bulbs and accessories for pretty much any fitting and environment. As far as controlling the lights from your smartphone is considered, the lights also support Google Assistant and users can control the Hue bridge just by saying keywords like “Turn up the lights” or “Turn off lights in Bedroom 1” and the Assistant will take care of everything else. In the evening we then had the lights turn back on when we arrived back at the house.Īdditionally, the Philips lighting system is also compatible with Apple HomeKit, Google Home and Amazon Alexa. From here you’ll be able to set the lights to automatically turn on and off when you arrive at, and subsequently leave the house, as well as allowing you to have the lights turn on and off automatically at different times.īy way of an example, we had the lights turn on to help us wake up in the morning, before automatically turning off when we left the house for work. Of much great importance is the routines section of the app. ‘Energise’ was perfect for the mornings when the harsh white light worked well to blow away the cobwebs, while ‘Relax’ worked better in the evenings where we wanted our brains to wind down. We found ourselves relying mostly on the activity-specific defaults. The easiest way to do this is with Philips’ pre-configured scenes, which range from ‘Energize’ (a cool white light) through to ‘Relax’ (a richer yellow hue). The real fun starts when you tap the room’s icon on the left of the screen, which allows you to customize the exact bulb color. You can tap on the switch to the right of the screen to turn them on to their last setting, but if you’re using the default settings you’re nowhere near using the Philips Hue bulbs to their potential. The default home screen shows you your available rooms, allowing you to control all their bulbs as a group. It's a breeze to start using the system and control the lights through the app. With your bulbs assigned to rooms, the setup process is complete and you can now play around with the colors (shades of white, in this case). When your bulbs are discovered you’ll need to assign them to rooms, which allows you to control groups of them much more easily. Once the app is set up, it will ask you to connect to the Hue Bridge by holding down the big button on the Bridge. When we were setting our bulbs, the bridge discovered the bulbs quickly and easily. Meanwhile, download the Hue app available both for iOS and Android smartphones.
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