I should know something by next weekend… i have 11 lifx color bulds coming in next week
This is always a very good question, and has been much discussed in the forums. Start with the following topic:
Awesome, I struggled to decide whether I should get 3 br30 Hues, or Lifx, so very interested in how they work as I ended up going with the hues (3 for 130 bucks w/hub on black friday @ best buy)
I have both smart switches and bulbs. Smart bulbs mostly for my outdoor lights. Smart switches and bulbs combo for my indoor lighting. I started with just smart bulbs or smart switches but because of hue and kids with dumb switches. I am now slowly combining them together.
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Like Ray, we use different things in different parts of the house. We do use zwave switches with dumb bulbs in some areas, and they work well.
In places where we want smart bulbs (maybe because of smart bulb features like color management, or maybe because we don’t want to wire switches), we have had really good success with four parallel means of control:
One) echo to provide voice control of the lights. This is the one that gets used most often. As I’ve mentioned before, we have a lot of people who come through the house, both my housemates’ friends and healthcare workers, and the echo was just really easy for everybody to use. (The lights on the hue bridge also work by voice with HomeKit, but only for people who are authorized.)
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where appropriate, the Phillips hue dimmer switch. This is a battery operated switch that can be put on the wall or on a table. It can control up to 10 bulbs as a group. Very intuitive for guests. It’s not in perfect sync with SmartThings, but SmartThings does poll the hue bridge every five minutes so it catches up pretty quickly. We have one of these on the guestroom nightstand for the lights in that room and everybody’s really liked it. Note that this does work locally with the hue bridge so it works even if the Internet goes down.
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automations. This includes some lights to come on at a particular time of day, and some lights that come on with the motion sensor.
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for emergencies if the home automation system went out, we leave the original light switch in place with a child lock over it just to remind people not to use it. But it’s there if needed.
This all sounds more complicated than it is. Everything works very intuitively. As I said most people use voice, but the dimmer switches are available when needed. And in an emergency, people know exactly how to turn the light on or off as long as there is power.
Different Use Cases, Different Solutions
The main point is that we found after a year of working with automated lights that we don’t have to have just one solution. It’s all about what works in that particular room for that particular light for however many use cases we have there.
More Choices in one Room
I’ve mentioned this before, but one other thing we’ve done that we didn’t do previously is to have more extra lights in the room, particularly small table lamps on desks and tables and that gives us a kind of tiered lighting which has been really effective.
So with one voice command I can turn on the ceiling light, the nightstand night, the desk lamp, and a light on the dresser.
The hue dimmer switch might control only the nightstand lamp and the desk lamp, but that creates a lit path from the doorway to the bed.
The wall switch might control only the ceiling light, but we don’t use the light switch very much anyway. There’s a motion sensor which turns the ceiling light on in the evening, but then after bedtime doesn’t turn the ceiling light on and instead turns on a night light on the wall.
We did something similar in the kitchen, where there’s a counter light, two smart bulbs in stick lamps up on the cabinets, and a ceiling light. The wall switch controls the ceiling light, and the others are on voice and Hue dimmer switches.
here the point is that we turn on the lights based on what we need light for at that moment, rather than there just being a single lights on/lights off state for each room. This is like the original concept of lighting scenes.
Going forward
I am intending to put more hard wired switches in next year in my phase 2 project but for now, this has worked well. 
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@Benji I haven’t had that experience, but you could always use the Switch to turn off power to the smart bulbs during the night if you use both…
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Rules machine is your friend 
Lights on motion after X turn off. No lights on in X room between x and y hrs
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The only potential problem I see with this is the fact (unless it’s not a fact lol ) that the smart bulbs don’t normally (or at least not reliably, consistently) report their on/off state to the hub when power is removed from and/or returned to them.
…or has that been addressed/fixed with a community supported device type somewhere here? I know I saw one that makes them report when they are on, but not off, and I’m not even sure if the reporting when on is working.
More info on this would be very useful.
My point is…if the smart bulb can’t be trusted to report whether it is in the on or off state, how can a SmartApp which is dedicated to monitoring it know when to do anything with it?
If power goes off, and the smart bulb loses sync with the hub, how can anything or anyone know what’s going on unless they are physically present and have the ability to interact with it directly?
Then what’s the point of the smart bulbs then 
This is why I’m going with switches from now on. Makes much more sense, especially when you’ve got 4 can lights for example.
Reliable dimming and color selection.
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Other than colour, I still would trade smart bulbs for smart switches… like I said, only takes a couple of times for the power to blip in the middle of the night and you’ll want to switch to the smart switches.
I won’t need to switch as I started with switches and am transitioning to both =p
I haven’t had good luck with dimming leds, so this works better and more reliably for my use case.
If I should run into that scenario, I would simply as I said before turn power of to the bulbs at the switch level during the night
If you turn them off at the switch level at night you’ll have to turn them back on at the switch level in the morning before you run any other automations. That will work for some people, not for others, like pretty much every other lighting scenario. 
In my own case, I don’t care if they do come back on at full power. I like to know when there’s been a power outage at night. I have a lot of stuff running and some of it may need to be checked or reset. And we don’t have any little kids in the house or other people that we would want to sleep through the outage. So from my perspective, it’s a feature, not a flaw. But that’s just because of our specific household. I do recognize absolutely that it would be a real annoyance in many homes, or at least in some rooms in many homes.
Choice is good, for precisely this reason. There will be some households where smart bulbs are preferable to switches. Some where switches are preferable to smart bulbs. Some where a mix works best.
It’s important to know that many smart bulbs will likely come onto full brightness after a power outage. But where that falls on the pro/con scale will vary for each person.
BTW, some bulbs are starting to change this behavior. I believe it’s Osram lightify that has a new firmware update that causes the bulb to reset to previous level. So we may see even more choices in the future.
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Exactly, this is why I only have a few bulbs left, and they are color bulbs.
With the deals I’ve gotten on the GE zwave switches I’ve changed out every switch in my house (literally every switch). 26 switches total. At regular price I would have spent approximately $1100.00 on switches. But I’ve only spent about $210.00.
It is just good financial lol! Thanks a ton @texamr
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holy cr@p. no kidding. I havent gotten a one yet. Congrats, man!
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How could you have acquired 26 switches retailing for 30-40 a piece for 210$ total? I’m curious
Clearance! My job is a road warrior job. I drive hundreds of miles every day giving me the chance to go to a lot of stores for price matching.
Overall I average about 8.75 for each of my switches.
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In the Fall of 2015 Lowe’s put out a new generation of their Iris home automation system. A few of the first-generation devices, in this case, specifically the GE switches, also work with SmartThings. These models were being discontinued by Lowes in favor of newer models, and so many Lowe’s stores had them on sale.
They would also generally price match. So if you found one store that had them marked way down, and bought them there, you could then take that receipt to other Lowe’s in other areas and often get the same very low price even if they didn’t have their stock marked down that much.
This was discussed in detail in the deals thread. 
And I made out like a bandit on this deal!
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