What is Philips Hue?
Philips Hue is a smart lighting system which gives you complete control over your lighting. You might be thinking to yourself, “I have light switches, I have control over my lights now.” Well, smart lighting systems like Philips Hue and others give you control like you’ve never had.
With Philips Hue, you can control the color of your lights. Not just red, green, or blue, but around 16,000,000 color variations. Surely there’s just the right color to highlight your wall color, your hair, or set any mood you like.
Even for “white” light, you can set the color temperature. By using subtle shades of red, yellow, and blue, you can vary the light temperature from cool to neutral to warm. Simulate sunlight, or fluorescent lights if that’s your desire.
What Does a Philips Hue Lighting System Consist Of?
There are two options. The simplest is to use a dimmer switch to control the bulb. The more involved method is to use a Hue Hub to control the bulbs, and something to control the hub like an app on your phone or a voice assistant like Alexa, Google Home, or Cortana. The simpler approach gives you some basic functionality, the more complex approach gives you nearly limitless possibilities.
Using Philips Hue Lighting Without a Hub – The Simplest Way
Philips calls this Standalone Mode. This mode uses Bluetooth connections to control the light bulbs. To use this method, buy a kit that includes both the bulb and the dimmer switch. This gives you control of the bulb from that dimmer switch.
You won’t have all the capabilities of the Philips Hue lighting system if you go this route, but it’s a start. The switch allows you to turn the bulb on and off, and dim and brighten the bulb. This is the same functionality you have with a regular bulb and dimmer switch. If you buy a kit with a “White ambiance” or “White and color ambiance bulb” in it, you start to realize some value over a traditional setup.
With the ambiance types of bulbs, you can cycle through 4 preset light scenes, or recipes. These presets are called “Read”, “Relax”, “Energize”, and “Concentrate”. These are the only four colors the bulb will produce, and they are really just color temperatures, variations of white.
An alternative to controlling the lights in this mode is to use the Philips Hue Bluetooth app. Download the app, and you can control up to 10 lights directly from your phone or tablet.
Is Philips Hue Worth it Without a Hub?
If you compare the money you’ll spend on a new ‘dumb’ LED bulb and a traditional dimmer switch, it’s worth going the smart route. At least then you have the option to upgrade and expand your system in the future.
Let’s take a look. The Philips Hue Smart Dimmable LED Smart Light Recipe Kit on Amazon at the time of this writing is around $35 for white ambiance bulb, which gives you the 4 colors. For the single-color white-ony bulb version it’s around $20. Neither kit requires installation, the dimmer switch sticks to the wall with two-sided tape, or you can screw it to the wall. And the wall switch doubles as a remote control.
A simple traditional LED-compatible dimmer switch is around $12 and requires installation. An LED bulb costs about $2.50, but comes in a 2-pack or 4-pack, so that’s around $10 for the bulbs, coming to about $22.
That comes to $22 for an old-fashioned setup that requires light switch installation, $20 for a comparable Hue setup (meaning one color), and $35 for a smart setup that gives your four color shades (white ambiance), and the option to expand later. For the $13 difference, the Hue white ambiance is an easy winner in our book. It’s shown at right at the current price.
Using Philips Hue Lighting With a Hub – The Extensible Way
If you really want to get into some fancy, elaborate, or crazy lighting scenes, using the Philips Hue
Hub is the way to go. The Hue Hub serves as a bridge between the smart light bulbs and the network which connects them all, which utilizes your Wi-Fi network for connectivity. A single Hue Hub can control up to 50 Hue smart bulbs.
The Hue Hub connects to your Wi-Fi router. The app on your smartphone communicates with the Hub over Wi-Fi, which in turn communicates with the bulbs using the Zigbee Light Link standard.
There is an official app, the Hue Bridge, to use to control the lights with, of course. The best part, though, is that Philips encourages developers to create their own apps for Hue. There is a Showcase of third-party apps for Hue on their developers website. More on developing your own Hue apps in another post – and if you’ve developed one already, let us know.
The Hue Hub comes in a starter kit with a smart bulb or two. There are a variety of kits available, packaging Hubs with regular bulbs, floodlight-type bulbs, or outdoor bulbs.
Once you connect the Hub to your router, and download the Bridge app, your ready to take over the (lighting) world!
All Connected, What Can I Do?
You can control all of your smart lights, indoors or outdoors. You can set up scenes, which allow you to define the intensity and color of all of your lights for a particular scene – watching a movie, entertaining, gaming, staring at the fireplace, weekend house cleaning, anything you would find handy. You can set up timing routines for your lights, such as having the lights turn on and off when you’re away to make it appear that someone is home.
You can also set up smart accessories, like a motion detector to turn lights on. I’ve saved the most exciting for last, though.
The Philips Play HDMI Sync Box (below) will connect your lights to your TV, which allows for some real excitement. The lights can be set to change colors and dim and brighten with the action on the television! Tech is so cool!
What do Philips Hue Light Fixtures Look Like?
You would be surprised. There are several indoor and outdoor light fixtures available. They have very modern styling. They look smart and tasteful, with a designs that will look good for years.
Here are a few examples of outdoor fixtures (linked to Amazon in case you want to see more):
This one is full color, and can be wall or ceiling mounted
This outdoor flood is white and color
This floodlight is white only
These spotlights are white and color
Here are several examples of Hue indoor lights:
This is the Play light, the light Philips shows used with the HDMI Sync Box, but really the box will control any of the Hue lights. The idea is to put these behind the TV or next to the TV facing the wall. With the HDMI Sync Box, you connect up to 4 devices to the box, and the lights will react to those devices when you use them. The lights can show the colors in the scene on the TV, or dance with the music you’re listening to. Use the Hue Bridge app to define which lights are controlled by the box, and the intensity of the effect.
If you were asking yourself “What is Philips Hue?”, hopefully we’ve answered your question here. It’s an awesome lighting system. You can get started easily with only the Bluetooth app and a bulb. You can add the Hub and get more control of more lights, and you can go whole-hog and get the HDMI Sync Box and give your entertainment system some control over your lights as well. There’s an active developer forum and resources hosted by Philips, so more creative applications of this technology is sure be coming our way for a while.
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