Bulbs or Switches

So I have a question about preference here. I am in a newly built home and just beginning my SmartThings journey. Do you guys utilize intelligent switches, intelligent light bulbs, or both in your designs? What are the benefits of each and using both?

This is already covered pretty throughly

More reading:
https://community.smartthings.com/search?q=Smart%20bulb%20smart%20

It’s entirely dependent on your situation and your skill level, IMO.

I went with switches whenever possible because I had no problems dealing with the electrical in my house and because I wanted to avoid the sync issue or having a “smart” bulb on a dumb switch that I couldn’t control because the switch was physically off.

I have lamps that have smart bulbs though, and lamps that have strange funky sized bulbs that need to be plugged into a smart outlet of some sort.

Of course the bad thing is that now when I move I have to pull everything out and replace switches, whereas bulbs are significantly easier to swap out.

Like I said, it’s all specific to your situation.

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Agreed. I can change out a switch, and my home has decent wiring with neutral and ground to every switch - so my rule here is if it’s on a switch, change the switch to a smart one. If it’s not, then it might be a bulb or an outlet controller.

If touching electrical wiring isn’t your thing, then the decision is equally easy :smile:

I’m all for switches for one good reason. When we get a power outage, which isn’t very often but it happened twice this year, my 3 Wink bulbs have to be re-associated. I have never had a switch go missing with a power blip.
For me, smart bulbs are really only when there is no reasonable switch access.

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Another good point I need to add to the notch of ‘pros’ against the switch.

That’s interesting… I have about a dozen or so TCP bulbs and they’ve managed to survive through power outages with no issues.

Granted, I still have the occasional issue with some of them that just start blinking out of the blue, but not because of power outages. :smile:

The Cree Connected bulbs survive power outages a LOT better for some reason, never had an issue with them, it’s just the GE Links, I wonder what firmware version they are supposed to be on these days some of mine report their version as 0.1b03 / 0.4b00 and some don’t report the version at all…