Make your life easier by installing lights that automatically turn on when you walk into the room.
Having completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, LIFX has become well-known in the smart lighting space. Competing with quality brands like Philips Hue, they strive to offer high-quality products, with a price tag to match.
While their range might not be as vast as competitors what they do offer works well, and you won’t be disappointed. Keep reading to better understand if LIFX is for you and just as importantly, which lights you should look at.
LIFX has positioned itself as a high-end smart light solution, with the quality and price tag to back this up. While their lighting selection might not be in the hundreds, the products they offer do a great job and will work for most people.
With quality comes added cost, as you might imagine this means they’re not the most budget friendly smart light choice.
You’ll find their range mainly focuses on bulbs over say lamps or light strips, with many of their models supporting “billions” of colours. If smart lights that can change into any colour is something you’re after, LIFX could be a great option.
You’ll find they create very few accessories themselves, instead opting to instead support third-party accessories. Meaning you can use a Philips Hue Dimmer switch, along side a Samsung SmartThings Motion Sensor to control your lights.
As LIFX bulbs connect through WiFi, you don’t need to purchase a separate hub to get them working, instead your current home WiFi router will be enough.
WiFi products tends to be pretty straight forward to setup, and LIFX is no different, only requiring a few steps.
Two things to note. It’s recommended when initially setting up your lights to do so near your WiFi router – after setup you can freely move it around your house. Lastly, they only work on the 2.4 GHz frequency, this shouldn’t pose a problem for most people as this is the most common frequency for WiFi (with 5GHz becoming more popular).
As with most LED lights, you’re looking at around 25,000 hours – matching most other products on the market. Replacing your lights shouldn’t be something you need to worry about for quite a while.
For example, if you use your lights for 6 hours a day you’ll get roughly 11.5 years out of them.
The LIFX range will provide around 800-1100 lumens depending on which product you choose. If you’re not sure what lumens means, and you’re used to lights being say 60W here’s a quick rule-of-thumb on lumen to watt.
It’s also good to note, that LED bulbs (like the ones LIFX use) consume much less power, so at 800 lumens it’ll only consume 9W. Meaning you’ll get the light equivalent of a 60W bulb, while only using 9W, helping you cut down on your electric bill.
Yes, yes and yes. LIFX has thankfully chosen to support all 3 major smart assistants to ensure they cover as many buyers as possible. This means no matter your assistant (they also support Cortana) you’ll be able to control your lights with simple voice commands.
This also means if at any time you choose to switch your smart assistant, you won’t need to re-purchase any lights. It’s great when things just connect and work together.
While they offer some outdoor lights, their range focuses on indoor lighting first and foremost. Since they don’t require a hub, instead connecting straight to your router, they don’t have a starter kit like other brands.
Their most popular and flushed out section, LIFX really shine in the high-end smart light bulb section.
The below 3 lights all have a peak brightness of 800 lumens (60W equivalent) which should be bright enough for most people.
Great bulb for anyone that doesn’t need to change the tone or colour of their light, but still wants the smart features.
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Our choice for the bedroom and bathroom. Able to shift from a warm orange tone to promote a better sleep, or cool blue to help you wake up.
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It now becomes a question on which lights should you go with, we’ve provided a quick summary on why you might want to choose one light over the other.
If you need your lights to be a little brighter for say the kitchen, where being able to see is quite important – LIFX also has a few lights that can hit 1100 lumens (75W equivalent).
Great alternative to the LIFX Colour bulb above, that offers the same great features but offers a brighter light.
Buy on Amazon.
Besides the bulb range, they also have a small select of light strips. They’re mainly used to bring a more immersive experience to watching TV or playing on your computer. If that’s something you’re after.
When you want to introduce an immersive experience to say, watching TV.
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It’s certainly personal preference as to whether they add or take away from the watching experience, we weren’t sold on them until we tried them ourselves. We’d recommend sticking with bulbs at first, before jumping into light strips.
While a LIFX switch does exist, LIFX don’t offer a wide range of accessories made by themselves. Instead they’ve opted to support other brands and third parties.
We really like this and wish more brands went down this route, it means that you can use already established accessories to control your lights. Opening the ability to mix and match accessories depending on your budget and needs.
The list of supported third-party products is quite impressive, and here are some accessories that work well with the LIFX range.
Giving you the ability to dim your lights, along side turning them on and off easily.
Buy on Amazon.
If you’d like to add motion sensing to your rooms, than the Samsung SmartThings Motion sensor is a great choice.
Buy on Amazon.
One of the cooler smart lighting products on the market right now, the LIFX Beam is a series of six translucent, beam-like rods, each a foot long and filled with LEDs.
You can customize the Beam modules however you like, though the base package only allows you to make a single 90 degree turn. The Beam system supports a maximum of eight Beam modules and two corners per controller.
The Beam is a fun, interactive way to light up a room. Its color-changing capabilities and special effects make it a great way to add some excitement to any space.
When it comes down to it, LIFX is a great choice when thinking about introducing smart lighting into your home. While yes there are other more budget friend bulbs out there, the great build quality and support for third-party hardware and software is a huge factor.
We hope more companies adopt the “works with many third-party accessories” to enable homeowners with more choice on what they include in their home.
If you need or want more smart light choices, such as lamps, than take a look at the Philips Hue range. Or if you’re after more information on what smart lights can do for you, head to our ultimate smart lighting guide.
