Smart Home: Philips Hue

As I recommended in my Smart Home: Overview post, the Philips Hue system should be one of your first purchases if you are building a smart home. The system is definitely pricey, but it is stable & well integrated into all of the main smartphone platforms where you can enable voice control as well as quickly test out a wide variety of automations. Plus, they’re cool.

Philips Hue Components

The system is comprised of 3 key components:

• Hub
• Lights
• Accessories

The hub controls all of the Hue lights and accessories and is the brain of the system. You connect it to your home wireless router via an ethernet cable.

The lights come in a wide variety of formats and functionalities from standard bulbs to the flood lights. Most bulbs come in 3 varieties – dimmable full color, dimmable white spectrum, and dimmable white. The run from ~$40 each for the full color bulbs ~$15 each for the dimmable white.

There are wide variety accessories to help round out the Philips Hue ecosystem – motion sensors, light switches, and a few other assorted items.

What to Buy

I recommend getting one of the Philips Hue starter kits because you get everything you need to get started. If you have a little money to spend, the color bulbs are pretty awesome. For most people though, the white ambiance bulbs provide a good balance of price and functionality. The white ambiance bulbs are dimmable and will show full spectrum of white color – from bright white to a warm yellow/orange.

• Color Starter Kit Recommendation – This $180 kit comes with the hub, 3 color bulbs, and 2 accessories.
• White Ambiance Kit Recommendation – This $120 kit comes with the hub and 4 white ambiance bulbs.

If you are looking to buy some accessories, I recommend the motion sensor ($40) and the dimmer switch ($25). The motion sensor will really expand your automation options and the dimmer switch is a nice control without using your phone.

One of the great features of the Hue system is that these accessories and more lights can easily be added later once you are comfortable with everything.

Getting Started

Once you have your system setup, the fun starts. Since Philips Hue is fully compatible with HomeKit, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa, you can add voice control to all Hue scenes almost immediately, but I’m putting the cart before the proverbial horse.

Honestly, this area can get very complicated, very quickly, but I’ll walk you through a few basic steps to get started. Let’s pretend that you have setup your Hue lights in your Living Room and you want to setup a few scenes.

Create a Movie Scene

1. Set the Light Intensity – Open the Hue app and set the individual lights 30% brightness. Use the slider at the top to adjust all the lights in this room at once. The slider under each light name to adjust that individual light.
2. Adjust the Light Color – Use the “inverted droplet” icon to access the color wheel. The color wheel will be different depending on whether you have color lights or the white ambiance lights. The numbered marker will indicate how many lights are that color. You can drag and drop lights onto each other to create a group, and then drag that group to the preferred color.
3. Name and Save the Scene – Tap “New Scene” to name the scene. Enter “Movie” and click Save on the Hue app.
4. Review the Scene – The scene is saved as a one tap setting called “Movie.”

Add Scene to HomeKit

As a general rule, the scenes created within a specific app, like Philips Hue, do not automatically show up in HomeKit (or other platforms). You have to recreate the scene in HomeKit to enable voice control.

1. Set the Movie Scene – This is the scene you just created in the Philips Hue app.
2. Add a HomeKit Scene – Open HomeKit and click the + in the upper right corner. Select “Add Scene”
3. Select the Lights in HomeKit – Select the lights you want to to be in the scene and click “Done.” You should pick the lights you set in the Philips Hue App.
4. Name the HomeKit Scene – Name the scene and click “Done.”
5. Test Voice Control – Now you can say “Hey Siri, set the Movie scene” and your lights will respond. This is your first automation!

Next Steps

Continue to iterate these two processes as many times as you heart desires. If you purchase the motion sensor, your options really open up for more automation possibilities. For example, I use the motion sensor in my bedroom to turn lights on when I enter and then automatically turn them off if no motion is detected after a few minutes.

This automation is especially great in that I have it setup to only turn the lights on to 10% when it detects motion between 11PM and 10AM. Now I’m not blinded when I get up to go to the restroom in the middle of the night.

Conclusion

I definitely started out as a skeptic, but honestly the Philips Hue system has been one of the best smart home devices I have added. I think they are a great way to get started with your smart home.