Relevant to this discussion…A19 kits available for $55 on Amazon w/Prime shipping.
I’ve got a mix of coloured bulbs, and Lux white ones.
I think I can count on one hand how many times I’ve changed a bulbs colour that wasn’t just showing off or messing around. Typically, they’re all white - so I’d say think hard before buying coloured bulbs.
I only got coloured ones as they were super-cheap… I’ve got a V1 bridge, and at the time Currys were updating their stock to the V2 ones. It was too confusing to have both on the shelf at the same time, so they had to get rid of all the stock containing V1 hubs; but because the documentation and box artwork also changed, they also sold off all the individual bulbs too.
I think my Lux starter kit was £29 (three bulbs and a hub), my GU10 starter kit was £49 (three GU10s and another hub). I then bought another Lux starter kit (including another hub!) plus a coloured bulb (that was £19).
I think the moral is if you ever see them cheap - buy them, worry later. The prices are so stable that you’ll never have a problem selling them on if you change your mind, especially if they’re still sealed.
Use one of the Amazon alert tools to notify you of a price drop, have an eBay saved search too. Anything that avoids paying full price.
I sold two of my bare hubs for about £10 each on eBay which helped, so don’t be afraid to “over buy”.
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How do you get the ‘bulbs’ to do the police pattern/colors with your alarm? Is this through SHM, SmartAlarm, or something else? Thanks
Thanks! Guess that solves my debate with which RGBW controller to go with for my strip lighting I am about to install (was debating between Fibaro and FLS-PP).
What little spot LEDs are you using on your deck flooring?
I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. Ouch on the price though, I would need a lot of them! I’m toying with the idea of making something similar…
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All agreed. I’ve got a 15 metre tall Windmill I want to illuminate so putting a number of these around the base would be bloody expensive.
As a side note I came across Big Clive whilst searching:
http://www.bigclive.com/flud.htm
I’ve got a couple of these PCB’s made up that I need to test at night (when I get 5). Either way its never going to look as good as the item listed above!
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Hah! Everyone needs to know about Big Clive! Damn, wish I’d not seen that floodlight 
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I use the colours only for our children, they have colour bulbs in their playroom. Have one behind the tv too but didn’t catch up.
As for cost I can tell that I tried a few systems, including Lightify and still I decided to go with Hue. Every other system I tried had at least tiny annoyances.
Lightify was the worst. The brigde got disconnected from my account a few times and the only way to reconnect was that support reset my account or I created a new account. I had 3 bridges in about 8 months. The bulbs kept resetting to default settings. Few started buzzing, two stopped working completely (I had 18 bulbs). The fade in and out effect didn’t work properly.
So I went with Hue. Bulbs are expensive, but at least are flawless. Too bad there’s no UK size wall switch.
Without dimmer, because beside colour the dimming is also useless most of the cases. I don’t want to dim the bathroom, the toilet, kitchen, hallway, porch, etc.
I removed the switch and just put a Tap on top of the blanking plate.
Thanks for all the feedback everyone.
@jbtibor I ended up getting a Lightify strip and a single color bulb. I have noticed that when I change colors on the strip, it does not just switch from, say, red to blue. It flashes thru a couple of different colors before landing on the one I selected. Is that what you noticed as well… or is that “normal”?
I did not really get to test much with the colored bulb. One of the kids saw it and claimed it as hers and bought it from me on the spot. lol We have it connected to the Lightify bridge (the other non-color bulbs and the strip are connected directly to ST) so that she can have the Lightify app on her phone. Otherwise we would have to give her access to all of ST app which we did not want to do.
I started down that route until I realized she could only turn the light off and on. The Lightify app has a lot of pre-programed scenes and transitions that work well for her. Having the bridge will also allow me to update other lights in the house.
@Etoimos I don’t remember the colour issue happening with the Lightify bridge, but it does happen with the bulbs connected to SmartThings. Until now I thought it’s because of ST, but maybe it’s the bulb itself. There might be a software update to fix it, but is so painful to link the bulbs to Lightify hub, update, then add it back to ST that I rather leave it as is. We don’t actually use the colours anyway.
Thanks. I guess I could move the strip over to the Lightify bridge and update it to see if that fixes the problem… I could also test the transition there to see if it does it on it’s own bridge. The wife is going to be out of town for a week, so I’ll have plenty of time to mess with it. lol
I think the Philips system is far more economical than other systems. The White bulbs are $15 (or less) while most people charge $40-$60 for each bulb. I bought the bridge new for $45 shipping included. So my 3-bulb starter kit was about $90. Unless you’re not going to have over two bulbs total, Philips seems the way to go.
The other thing about these bulbs is that that actually put out some light. I had some of those more expensive bulbs and the colored ones and they just did not get bright even at 100%. They seemed equivalent to about a 40-watt incandescent while the Philips White bulbs are more like a 100-watt.
Your take on affordability of the Hue system over others is interesting. When I mapped out my house using a all Hue setup vs an all Lightify setup, the Hue system would cost $635 more. That is based off of 16 colored bulbs and 55 white bulbs. Those numbers reflect white tunable bulbs from each company for an apples to apples comparison.
I don’t see how that’s possible when the bulbs are $15 each and all the other brand bulbs are $40+. Where are you finding bulbs less than $15?
The least expensive Lightify bulb I found on Amazon was $23 and the Philips are about $13.
He said “white tunable bulbs” - I think that the White Hue tunables (2700k-5000k) are around $30 or so, the non-tunable (2700k) are $15.
I don’t think I’d ever use white tunables very much…the lumens seem to fall quite a lot when you go to 2700K (like down to 400-ish), and soft white (2700k) is what I’d want most of the time anyway. Daylight setting is usually too harsh.
Yes, I’m comparing the tunable bulbs.
@Danabw, good point about the lumens being lower at 2700k on the tunables vs non-tunables at the same 2700. Lightify does not list the lumens as different temps that I can find.
Yeah, it is really nice that Hue lists the difference in lumens at various settings.
Also nice that the newest Hue A19s are 840 lumens (previous gen was 800), I prefer to have a brighter soft-white light and dim it down if needed (which is not often for me).
@Etoimos Over-the-air firmware updates to Osram and Hue bulbs is being added to ST hub firmware, so maybe you don’t have to update with Lightify hub.