I’d love to use smart bulbs but my house is all led downlights.

Love this review also pretty sure for majority of ppl the type of light bulb will make a little difference [as long as it connects and works].

We use color A19 at the sides of front door [Holiday lighting: e.g. Halloween orange, etc] and Master Bedroom (mostly white). Wiz, Kasa are fine. Don't pay $45/phillips.

I use smart switches (Insteon), but I feel like I'm missing out on all the color mood lighting with standard bulbs.

Ecosmart tunable white were the best of several I tried for dimming low - almost as low as Hue, costs $5 and is regular old zigbee so it integrated with most HA hubs. Been really happy with them

Yeah I’ve stayed away from Lidl’s bulbs.

I’m running a Hue hub with (mostly) Hue lights but with 4 IKEA GU10s for the garden lights and an Innr colour bulb.

I think you gave Hue an unfair shakedown without enough research. In today’s hub-ridden ecosystem I appreciate that you didn’t like the hub, but one of the biggest pluses for the Hue ecosystem IS the hub. The hub houses a fully local and accessible API which can be used without needing cloud access to control the lights in the home. The API also supports push events, which make it extremely responsive when combined with software like Home Assistant. You also ran into the reset problems you did because you weren’t using the hub.

I’ve tried so many different smart bulbs, and while expensive, Hue is easily the best product on the market. LifX is nice, but as mentioned, it had a lot of reliability issues. In almost a decade of owning Hue bulbs I’ve never had the issues I had with LifX in a month. What good is a smart bulb if it has reliability issues?

Kasa! Hands down Kasa! I've got their smart lightbulbs and keep buying more. Soon every room will soon have them lol.

I love that I can schedule them to go on and off when i want. It's perfect having certain lights in the house come on when it starts to get dark. Even have them sceduled in the morning to slowly add light to the room to help me wake up. So versitile.

I'm really interested to know which smart bulbs have the best CRI.

I have been more than satisfied with the Govee Smart Light Bulbs for over 3 years

If you don't know which of those black wires is line and which is load and don't know how to figure that out then I don't think that most people here are going to want to try to help you. You need a multimeter and knowledge of how to use it.

That said, if the switch turned on and connected to WiFi then my guess is that you had it right but the bulb is burned out, the fixture is bad, or you zapped something in the switch.

Make sure the circuit is dead at the breaker box before continuing. Now, think of it as 3 wires (the switch should be grounded but don't think of those as wires, think of those as a separate safety device). Hook up your grounds where it says. Now on to the 3 wires. The whites all get twisted together, that's wire #1. Take one of the blacks coming in from the wall, hook it up to the black from the switch, that's wire #2. Hook up the other black from the wall to the red on the switch, that's wire #3. Your done. Everything should work. If it doesn't power up the switch then you're going to have to kill the power at the circuit breaker again and swap the black wires. If it powers up and connects after all of this, but won't turn on the light, either the bulb, fixture or switch are bad and need to be replaced (if the light was working before all this I'm guessing it would be the smart switch). Also possible to have a bad connection somewhere, so make sure and do them right the first time so you don't have that plaguing you.

Get a non-contact voltage tester and find out which one of those black cables has power when the breaker is on. That is your line wire (power) the other is your load wire that goes to the light.

Once you figure that out it's easy.

Bare copper = ground connects to the green screw

White gets connected to the white bundle

Black gets connected to the line (power) in the wall

Red gets connected to the black wire that does not have power when the breaker is on.

I would recommend to get some red electrical tape and put that on the load (light) black wire to make your life easier if you need to switch out the switch in the future. If you can afford it, Wago connectors are amazing for this stuff.

If you can't get a smart switch wired in by following the instruction packet you probably shouldn't be in that box, friend.

I get trying to save $ by doing it yourself, but electrical is probably the most dangerous thing you can mess with if you don't know what's up.

Also CE is scraping bottom of the barrel for all products, which may be part of the problem.

All the whites(neutrals) go together..the black wire connects to incoming power and the red wire goes to the black conductors that's goed to the light

I love the IKEA bulbs. They are pretty bright, work as ZigBee routers, and have excellent Zigbee2mqtt support. IKEA even openly provides update files for them and that's a practice I want to support! (Glares at Philips)

favorite would be the hue with zigbee. (even though i hate Philips and they are way to expensive, the hardware is good)

Runs through conbee 2. Best connection, best colors and transition

I need them as a 'repeater' downstairs otherwise zigbee network isn't stable.

Because of that i use Shelly E27 wifi Bulbs in the office.
They cost a third compared to the hue Stuff, Colors and transition are ok, no network issues so far and they run local

Favorite is Hue (with Z2M) because they're quite reliable and I prefer ZigBee for my primary lights so I can bind them directly to my Inovelli Blue series switches. This ensures the lights still work if HA is down (albeit without Adaptive Lighting).

I do really enjoy ambient lighting and having that lighting dance to music for mood setting. For that, I'm very OK with WiFi lights (WiFi bulbs are supposedly quicker to respond when using apps like iLightShow). I picked up the Govee Aura Lamp and it's pretty cool (admittedly, the built-in music processing is more fun than using it with iLightShow though). I would like to commit to a single brand for WiFi lights though, to avoid a thousand more apps in my phone that all do the same thing. Dunno if I'll stick with Govee or not, so I'm very interested in this thread.

Edit: clarity

I have bunch of ikeas. They’re good (+ good price) but they get stuck during transitions and doesn’t go dim as much as Hue.

Yes the new version is zigbee 3.0 I guess had the old one next to the new one and the new ones are much faster in response. Ended up buying 10 and adding them all to my zigbee network. Working great and fast and the price tag is just better than hue while they response same fast imo. I have also hue and I love it but the price is so much higher than the ikea bulbs.

Philips Hue bulbs via Zigbee.

Same. I also have some RGB LED pars that I gave WLED which I love but that's likely out of scope for the majority of casual Home Assistant people.

IKEA bulbs haven't done me dirty at all. Nor have any other of their Zigbee stuff. I also own some switching sockets and their new smart switches. The only complaint I have on IKEA bulbs is that the cheapest among them don't dim nicely. They do once above ~5% but below that they switch of quite harshly which makes doing nice transitions or using a smooth wakeup light difficult.

Second this, good quality and pricing.

Fits most of my needs. Dimming and color temp. Hooked up with a smart switch - so if HA is down the smart bulb works manually (set to turn on when powered up) with light switch.

Any automation involving them, I check status of smart light switch and turn it on before sending commands to the smart bulb - in case a luddite turns it off at the switch - all switches are on motion / radar - motion also pre-checks if smart switches are on upon detection.

Every system in my house fails gracefully to manual mode if HA goes down.

No. Don't do it. Fuck off with smart bulbs.

A few years ago when we bought our house, we did the smart home thing. Smart bulbs everywhere. Eventually, they started making smart switches and we got a few of those. There's a difference and it matters.

Smart bulbs screw right into the socket. You leave the light switch turned on and the bulb is always receiving power even when it's not producing light. Your smart device talks directly to it and you don't have to actually do anything to your house. That all sounds awesome until one of those bastards fail on you. Sometimes they just burn out like a normal LED bulb would. It takes a while and it's infrequent but it happens. Sometimes, the antenna dies and the bulb starts flickering. That's a thing that can happen too. When the time comes to replace one, it's more expensive than a regular bulb. Also, you've gotta go through the hassle of unsyncing the bulb from your system and discovering a new one. It gets old after a while. You'll get frustrated at the process and wait until a few go out, then do them all at once. That's what I did, at least. Also, when you go this route your smart device has to talk to each bulb independently.

Now let's talk about smart switches. You wire it into the wall like a normal switch and the smart device talks to that instead. The sockets take regular dumb bulbs. Bulbs burn out but switches never do. Also, if you ever move you can just reinstall some regular switches for like $3. Smart switches are absolutely the way to go.

Oh, and since you're using Alexa you'll want the GE switches that use ZigBee, not Z-Wave.

We have Philips Hue color bulbs for our living room. We control them with the app (not into voice controls personally although we had an Echo for a brief time). They're definitely a luxury, but it's fun to play with the lighting and tweak it to fit a certain vibe or go for certain colors/hues depending on the time of year as someone else mentioned. I think it depends how many you need though - if you're talking a bulb or two for a room, it's worth it. We had to buy 7 for our old house for the recessed lights and our new house will need a total of 9. We haven't purchased the extras yet because they're so expensive.

It's worth it IMO if you don't need to buy too many. If you need to buy like 9-10+, I don't think it is.

I've had smart bulbs for years and I've found them to be more trouble than they're worth.

I got mine for the ability to not just dim them but change the light temperature at different times of day. When I'm working from home, especially in the winter, I want bright cool-blue lighting, but before bed I want dim, warm-red lighting.

The other major reason I got them was to add lighting to my livingroom, which didn't have a light fixture or wiring. It allowed me to use plug-in sconces with a WiFi light switch.

For those purposes, they've been fantastic.

They're expensive and a PITA too though. You either need to buy a bunch of fancy light switches or rely on your phone to control your lights.

So I guess it depends how much you care about light temperature, because if you just want dimming, then dimmer switches are cheap and easy. For me the extra hassle and expense has been worth it.

Edit: I just noticed you said you'd be using voice control, so that will probably make things easier to operate.

In addition to the points you mentioned, here is what makes smart bulbs (or smart switches!) worth it for me:

1. Automatically turn off unneeded lights when I leave the house
2. Automatically turn on certain lights at sunset (and turn off at sunrise)
3. Automatically adjust color temperature throughout the day
4. Group lights together (for example I have all my exterior lights on a group and I can instantly turn them on if I hear something outside, etc)
5. Controlling kitchen lights with my voice if my hands are covered with pesto for some reason

For cost, non-color bulbs are much cheaper than color bulbs. However high-quality color lights are extremely fun.

Also, since they need to be turned on at all times to function properly (even if the light is off), if you have a power outage in the night, you'll be woken up by the lights resetting when the power comes back.

I've found that the response time for the bulbs I use (Phillips hue) was pretty slow, especially when using voice control.

I kept having issues where the hue bridge would not be synced to my app anymore, so i had to go to my basement where the hue bridge was to reconnect them.

The max brightness on the bulbs was still too dim for my tastes.

The bulbs are so expensive I never wanted to buy more than the initial 3.

And most egregiously in my opinion, Phillips recently decided that the first generation hue bridge would no longer work with Google assistant, so I would have to pay Phillips more money to get functionality back. This was the final straw for me, and I haven't used them since.

If you want to start growing and having the devices talk to each other, you might want to look into a smartthings hub. It will really expand the number of devices you can support (zwave & zigbee) and give you many more options for integration.

I don't know about the motion sensor, but I've added different "cheap" brands off Amazon for the lighting and they all work seamlessly with Google Home once they were set up through the Smart Life app (that's the app a lot of the off brand ones go through).

The only thing I will say is one of the sets is perfect - like every level of color and light works great and then another set works great for warm white, but in color mode if it's dimmed everything is light purple. So, there seems to be a lot of variation of quality which is to be expected, I suppose.

But for my uses, I like to set them to the color (usually just the warmth of white) and brightness I want and mostly use Google just to turn stuff on and off or on occasion dim/brighten.

r/homeassistant . . . . It pretty much doesn't matter WHAT you use..... I have Hue, TP-Link, and Smartthings all working together.

diyHUE works fine with Tradfi, Milight, esp8266 based devices and more.

I think that unless you’re into color control, smart switches have a lot more utility than bulbs.

With any smart solution be careful though. The equipment can outlast the company’s cloud offerings, so be wary of startups and lesser known companies as they have higher risk of folding shop without a community strong enough to figure out alternatives. Bonus to longevity if you can fully control the device without needing cloud services.

Cost wise:

Look at other options than Hue bulbs. For example, I use Yeelight color LEDs and have found them to be excellent! They are currently on Amazon for $29.99 so a lot cheaper than the hue at around $49.99. I have them around the house and love them.

Hue lights also require you to purchase a hub, so thats another consideration when buying. Some, like LIFX and Yeelights connect directly to your home WiFi and can be connected either through their own app, or through another like Google Home, or Amazon Alexa.

Are smart lights worth it?

Personally, which ever you use, I think they are. Having the ability to automate your lights and control them remotely is great. Having them come on at certain times (dusk etc) while you are away adds to your home security. You can also set them up with If This Then That (IFTTT) so that they come on when you arrive home. Again, they are not needed but they do offer great benefits and convenience.

One of the best things about having smart bulbs is the ability to dim them exactly how you want to. Never knew how nice it was to e.g. have the bedroom lights dimmed all the way down to 1% with warm white/orange.

If your asking if it will save you money in the long run, absolutely not. Smart bulbs will save you cents, maybe dollars per year. Even of you could save $2 a year in energy costs, that's still 8-15 years you would need to use it to make it worth it, the bulb probably won't even last that long.

They are worth it, however, for the convenience, especially if you actually automate them to the point that they interact with other devices and sensors in your house to turn on and off when needed on their own. It's nice walking down the hallway and having your stairway light turn on dimmed to 5% at 2am then walking into the kitchen to get a drink of water and the cabinet lights are already on and dimmed to a comfortable brightness.

Have zero issues with Hue or IKEA bulbs. I bind them directly to my Inovelli blue switch, which is in smart bulb mode.

The switch doesn’t actually cut power, it sends a zigbee command to the bulbs to turn on/off.

I don’t typically use WiFi devices, but issues you can run into is WiFi congestion, especially if you live around a lot of people. I would check to see what things are like. I use UniFi for my WiFi and it has a built in tool to scan the channels, I’d see what you can do with your setup.

Hue bulbs, no other Hue hardware/hub etc needed. Run them as native Zigbee through your regular HA Zigbee infrastructure. Instant response, first time, every time. Absolutely flawless.

I'm just starting out on my Matter journey as well. Most of my setup is still Philips Hue, but I’ve recently added some Wiz, Nanoleaf, and Cync bulbs. So far, I’ve got 14 Matter devices up and running.

Overall, they’ve been working pretty well. Occasionally there's a slight delay (second or so) when switching settings or colors, but functionally they behave just like my Hue bulbs.

So I have Nanoleaf essentials downlights, thread matter, they’re great now, but goddamn were they awful when I bought them. Lots of active development and updates has got them to the stable point they’re at now.

I’d be very wary of no or new name matter lights for this reason. There have been huge jumps in standards in the last two years taking these things from guaranteed frustration to stable and usable, you want to know the developer is at least trying.

The newer LIFX bulbs include Matter support with local control. I tried a few brands off Amazon (Govee, Linkind), and found the LIFX to be the best and most reliable. Hue, as recommended by others, is also a good choice, but a little more expensive.

Interesting to see Aqara getting ranked better than Govee. Aqara hardly has any smart lighting options whereas Aqara hardly has any smart lighting options apart from ceiling light , light strip. Govee literally has smart lighting products for every corner of the house and outside the house. I do like their WiFi to Bluetooth fallback functionality when dealing with reliability.

Crying in LIFX. Was an early adopter before many vendors were in the equation and so now have too many to replace. While they do offer quality the performance is horribly inconsistent. I was told by a tech that they just don’t perform well in ceiling fans. Seems like a bit of an oversight to me. I’ve lost track of how many replacements I’ve had and even opted to just buy a few new replacements because I got sick of going through their returns department. When they work they’re great but that’s almost completely displaced how often they just decide to give up one day

My ikea smart lighting is pretty reliable, and pretty cheap. 

I can't stand my nanoleaf lines, they are more inconcistent than a meth head trying to poach an egg.

I agree for the most part. Lutron is unmatched in stability. I’ve been using Lutron for nearly 20 years, and all my Pico remotes not only still worked, but integrated right into HomeKit when the hub was released and I set it up.

But the quality of light from Hue products is very good. Every other brand I’ve tried that’s less expensive either doesn’t have as much dimming granularity or the color isn’t as pleasing. Hue lamps on daylight setting legitimately look like the window blinds are open in the room when I pass by. They do it right.