Most of the switches listed below won’t work with 3-way switches, but you can add a $25 Lutron Pico remote mounting kit to get 3- and 4-way switches to dim. The Lutron switch doesn’t require a neutral wire, but the Elgato Eve switch does. Keep in mind that the Lutron dimmers require a bridge.īe aware: With any rewiring project, you’re going to need access to your circuit breaker and may want to bring in an electrician. You can schedule your lights to turn on and off at certain times or when you’ve left home. Even if you manually push the off button on the wall switch, you can still turn the lights back on with your voice via Alexa or Siri or from the app. With the Lutron Caséta wireless dimmers, you don’t have to worry about leaving them in the “on” position all the time. This is more work than swapping a bulb, but it has some advantages. You can still make them smart with switches. If you recently switched to non-connected, long-lasting LEDs, fear not. You can a four-bulb GE C starter pack for $75.
Individual Lifx bulbs are $23 for white and $45 for the Color 1000. Pricing: A Philips Hue starter kit for white light bulbs, which comes with a bridge and two bulbs, costs $70 the starter kit with a bridge and three color bulbs is $179.
Meaning if your roommate toggles the switch, you’re out of luck. While you can use your phone to turn on and off the C lights, you can’t yet set schedules or control them when you’re not home, as you can with Hue and Lifx.īe aware: One thing that makes smart bulbs frustrating is that they have to be always “on.” If your switch isn’t permanently flipped up, the app can’t illuminate the bulb for you. The Hue’s hub lets it work with several other devices, but to have Lifx integrate, you’ll need something like the Wink hub or “recipes” from the popular website If This Then That. Neither of those require a hub, just your phone and an app. Lifx works with your Wi-Fi, while the C by GE uses Bluetooth. With options like the Philips Hue, the smarts are in the bulb, but you also need a bridge - a separate, boxy device - to get them working. There are oodles of smart bulbs out there. I actually have a combination of all three going on right now, and there are pros and cons of each. There are a number of ways to make your lights smart: There are smart bulbs, smart switches, and smart plugs. There are some differences between Alexa and Siri, and we’ll get to those later. Pulling out my phone and asking Siri to turn on my lights isn’t too burdensome, but it did confuse my friend, who thought I was asking her to do my bidding.
#Alexa hue party mode Bluetooth
Enter the Amazon Dot: The $50 puck imbued with Alexa, paired with a Bluetooth speaker.Īs my condo is just 850 square feet, I can shout at Alexa to turn on my lights from pretty much anywhere. That means I could use HomeKit-compatible bulbs, but if he wanted to turn on the lights via voice-control, we needed another option.
#Alexa hue party mode android
First, I have an iPhone, while my husband uses an Android device. I can’t even count the number of LED and smart lightbulbs I have lying around, but when picking out smart lights for the DT smart apartment, I had a number of factors to consider. They’re installed like regular lightbulbs and with a 20+-year lifespan, it’s important that they’re portable. Lights are one of the easiest and most affordable entrances to a smart home, and smart bulbs are perfect for apartment dwellers. In the Smart Apartment series, we’ll look at gadgets that are affordable, portable, and hopefully useful.Īnd for the first installment, I wanted to tackle lighting. At the end of the series, we’ll examine the smart apartment as an ecosystem, and how all these devices - or do not - work together.ĭigital Trends is outfitting a condo in Seattle with tons of smart-home devices suited for an apartment. Each week, we’ll tackle a different category and look at various products, then explain how we made our selections. That’s why we decided to outfit a whole condo with smart devices that don’t require rewiring or permanent installation. Plus, apartments have different needs than single-family homes.
Smart-home devices sometimes require complicated installation that just doesn’t make sense for renters.
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