I’m completely out of the smart lights loop and I’m looking for light bulbs that allow me to set brightness, color temperature and possibly the color in general using HA.
I see a lot of people recommending zigbee bulbs, which is fine, I just need to buy a dongle, but I already have an isolated wifi network with no internet access that I use to control smart stuff from my home server, so something with wifi would be ideal. I want something that I can just screw in and control from my server with no proprietary apps needed for the initial configuration.
Can you give me some recommendations?
Thanks
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Philips Hue are still the best, but I’ve heard IKEA Tradfri are great too. The reasons for Hue bulbs being great are that they are extremely reliable, and their colour frequency range is said to be highest (and if you use a third party controller with their lightstrips the saturation/range isn’t as wide). The cost is worth it. When my router fucks up it’s really nice to have all my motion sensors (Also Hue), quick buttons (SNZB-01P) and lights work together.
A reason for not choosing Hue is they may not be as bright as you hope. As you seem to want white temperatures only and not the full colour spectrum, know that the regular bulbs are 800W and they’ve fairly recently got 1.6KW bulbs. So look for those if you want.
As for a dongle, I bought mine years ago but the Sonoff range is brilliant - their ZigBee USB dongles are very popular and very reliable. Tge one I own is the ‘Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus (CC2652P Coordinator)’, also known as ‘ZBDongle-P’. Many folk warn against the ZBDongle-E.
The reason people suggest avoiding wifi is more than just having the isolated network. Between the protocol requirements, the possibility of network congestion, and the high probability of overlapping wifi network signals, it can make them unreliable or just a bit slower than you’d expect a light to work.
Thread enabled devices can make this better, apparently; if I was in the market for bulbs outside of my current zigbee setup I would want Thread. Zigbee is excellent so far for me
Personally, I’m very happy with my Hue lights, but not super happy with the price; I only get them on sale. One aspect that is not discussed enough, in my opinion, is the quality of light (CRI, dimming depth, colour intensity), which hue is great at imho. The new hub does some nerdy stuff for motion detection if you have multiple bulbs in a room which is interesting, though I haven’t looked into it much.
Trying to build a Thread network today is a waste of money, sadly. There’s not enough competition there and prices are much worse than Zigbee,
Ikea’s line of matter bulbs and devices are showing up in stores now.
Good quality firmware and electronics at close to aliexpress prices.
Yeah, it’s not really built out yet. Zigbee is good enough, thread is supposed to make it better but I’m good with what I’ve got in hue - for now at least.
Isn’t IKEA’s new line thread?
The sylvania bulb I bought gets really hot. I stopped using it. Philips seemed ok.
I used to run Wyze bulbs over wifi, but they were too unreliable and didn’t always respond to commands. Switched to ZigBee with Thirdreality bulbs, they respond much quicker and are far more reliable than the Wyze bulbs ever were.
I’m pretty happy with my ThirdReality Zigbee light bulbs. I’ve got over a dozen now, nice and easy to use with HA
I have two Sengled zigbee bulbs (they also sell wifi bulbs, so choose carefully), and they’ve been great. They’re in my outdoor fixtures, so they deal with both freezing and very hot temperatures. They didn’t even have an issue when I changed my zigbee network channel. I’ve had them several years now without any issues at all.
They’re probably the same bulbs as yours, but I just wanted to give people another option.
Alright, I’ll get a zigbee dongle then.
Thanks for the replies.
I use Home Assistant’s own Connect ZBT-1 and ZHA. It works well with my ~40 zigbee devices.
For zigbee dongles, take a look at the SLZB-06. I used a sonoff usb dongle at first (which was fine), but then switched to the slzb which works nicer and lets you run it independently from your home assistant machine over Ethernet (you can still use usb if you like though).
I have like 50 ikea zigbee lights running off mine (plus the same amount of other zigbee stuff) and it works super stable with zigbee2mqtt.
I have the opposite experience, slzb-06 has been unreliable and I got zbt-2 recently and it’s a day and night difference. I had to keep slzb-06 connected to one of these devices that power cycle every 24 hours. It also lost settings more than once. Zbt-2 just works.
I just bought a few bulbs from Aliexpress which came preloaded with ESPHome and got set up in about 2 minutes per device. They cost about $15-20 per bulb (AUD) and I am very happy with them.
I have had for a bunch of years the IKEA brand of lightbulbs, which use ZigBee and maybe nowadays matter? I haven’t had to buy them recently and using ZigBee has been plenty fine for me so no need for me to change. The lightbulbs are not the best when it comes down to amount of colors, brightness and animations (HA only sees one animation which is a constant smooth change of color if the bulb has colors), but for the price they are sold, they were at least the best option back then. Maybe today there’s some other brand on a similar price category.
I have a couple of non-rgb IKEAs, No complaints given the price. Generally their smart home stuff is pretty much bang for the buck.
I would highly recommend a zigbee switch over a zigbee bulb. in that way you can still use the switch instead of locking in in the on position.
Nope, OP wants a bulb with temperature and brightness controls. A smart switch won’t do it.
Oh brightness adjustment is possible with smart dimmer, but you are right, most smart switch cannot change colors.
I run a bunch of Nous WiFi Matter bulbs for things like nightlights and availability display, and they work very well. The Matter server is running as a docker container besides HA.
I found that Phillips Hue bulbs works great with the Zigbee2Mqtt addon (and poorly/not at all with ZHA integration) and the $25 Sonoff dongle. Home Assistant sells their own dongle which I would imagine works even better too.
Hue bulbs are more expensive than most, but people seem to say they have the best color consistency.
If you want to stick with Wifi you could probably just hook up Tasmota plugs to your existing lamps.
Philips has chaned their policy a while back and now they collect telemetry data from their bulbs: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/09/22/philips-hue-force-users-upload-data-to-cloud/
That’s okay for me, because I don’t use their bridge the Hue Hub, or their app.
This only applies if you use their bridge and the bridge is connected to the internet. If you do what I said in my comment (zigbee2mqtt addon with dongle) then there is no path for them to collect. The Zigbee2Mqtt addon allows for firmware updates.
Does this only apply when using the Hue integration in Home Assistant, or does it also apply when the devices are connected via Zigbee? Do they require you to use the Hue mobile app for the initial pairing?
I don’t have any Hue devices so I don’t follow that too closely, but there’s quite a bit of info on the changes at The Verge which is linked on top of that previous blog post on my comment. Apparently you’ll need an account to get firmware updates and enabling functionality, but not continous connectivity.
But maybe more important point here is that they have changed their policy and there’s nothing stopping them from changing it again, potentially even removing functionality unless you use their app.
If they stop zigbee2mqtt from automagically updating their bulbs then they’re dead to me.
