LED bulbs seem to
be the future of home lighting: They save electricity, they're durable and they
don't contain mercury like compact fluorescents. But having them produce white
light like any old light bulb is like using a computer as a doorstop.
That's because each
LED, or light-emitting diode, is a small chip, the product of the same sort of
manufacturing process that spawned the digital revolution. The chips are backed
up by more electronics in the stem of the bulb. These bulbs are smart, or at least
they can be if we make them that way.
Philips, the
world's largest maker of LED lighting, does make them that way. The company has
produced the first kit of LED bulbs whose color and brightness can be
wirelessly controlled from your iPhone. I tested the Philips bulbs and, in
descending order of "smarts," I tried out some GreenWave Reality
bulbs whose brightness can be controlled by an app. I also looked at a cheap
off-brand color-changing bulb that comes with a remote control.
Why would you want
to control your light bulbs from your phone? I haven't really found a good
answer yet. On their own, these bulbs aren't a big deal. Few people will pony
up $200 for the Philips kit with three smart bulbs. But these products are
still interesting because they point the way to the future of lighting.
Remember: The first Apple computer was a niche product, too -and look where
that went.
Each Philips bulb
produces light equivalent to a 50-watt incandescent bulb. Additional bulbs cost
$59 each. That compares with slightly brighter, non-smart, white-light Philips
LED bulbs that cost $25 each.
The Hue bulbs cost more,
Philips says, because there are five unique and expensive lime-green LEDs in
each bulb, balanced by four red-orange ones and two blue ones. Together, these
LEDs produce a range of colors, including a nice span of "whites,"
from warm to cold.
In the future, the
price difference between color-mixing LEDs and regular ones will shrink, and
perhaps vanish. Adding color and wireless controls to bulbs will cost very
little, so we might as well get used to it.
In fact, I found a
cheaper alternative to the Hue :
an $18 bulb of the TorchStar brand. Amazon.com sells a bunch of similar ones
under different names. This bulb doesn't talk to your phone. Instead, it comes
with a small remote that lets you pick from 16 colors. Unfortunately, the
"white" color is a nasty bluish shade, reminiscent of a bad
fluorescent tube. It's also a lot dimmer than the Hue .
On the plus side,
the TorchStar produces more vivid, saturated colors than the Hue . To produce a good white, the Hue sacrificed the
ability to produce really deep colors.
I also found the
remote on the TorchStar pretty friendly. Do I really want to whip out my iPhone
or iPad and fire up the Hue
app every time I want to adjust the lighting? In fact, I was tempted to attach
the remote to the wall like a light switch - there's something to be said for
those old wall switches.
Once you have it
up, the free Hue
app is entertaining. One of the ways you can change colors is to pick a photo,
then point to the hues you want the lights to replicate. The app sends your
commands to your Wi-Fi router. The router, in turn, tells the Hue base station (a small box included in the
$200 kit) attached to it to send signals to the bulbs using a different
wireless technology, known as Zigbee. Philips says the signal can reach nearly
100 feet (30 meters). But it can travel even farther if you have your bulbs
strung out, because each bulb will relay the signal to others that can't
"hear" the base station directly. So these bulbs are
"smart" enough to talk to each other.
The
"smarts" doesn't go all that far, though.
You can set a timer
that's supposed to fade the light down slowly - a nice touch if you're trying
to get a kid to sleep - but it didn't work for me. The light just cut out at
the designated time, with no fade.
The base station is
capable of connecting to the Internet, so you can control your lights away from
the home. Some wags have created apps that turn the bulbs into disco lights
that change color in response to music they pick up from your phone's
microphone.
But this is just
the beginning of what an Internet-connected light should be able to do. In
theory, you could key a light to the changing colors of daylight, or to warn
you if there's likely to be rain today by changing to a green shade. The Hue doesn't do any of
that, yet. Changing the color is a manual process, even though it's mediated by
a smartphone.
I tried a third
"smart" lighting kit, from GreenWave Reality. This one contains two
bulbs, a remote and a wireless base station. The bulbs can be dimmed from an
iPhone app, but won't change color. It's nice to have the remote as a backup to
the app, but the overall usefulness of the kit was low.
GreenWave Reality,
the startup behind it, wants to sell it through utility companies, for about
$200. I can understand utilities wanting to push LEDs, but dimming just isn't
very effective in saving energy. The big power savings, about 80 percent, comes
from switching from incandescent to LED or compact-fluorescent bulbs. Cutting
the power use of an LED in half by dimming only yields savings of another 6
percent or so. Besides, the GreenWave bulbs flicker when turned down.
The Hue , TorchStar and
GreenWave bulbs co-existed in our house for a few months. What happened? Well,
after initially fooling around with them, we forgot about controlling the Hue and GreenWave bulbs
and just left them on full-blast white-light mode. We just didn't have enough
reason to keep fiddling with them. My kids had a lot of fun with the TorchStar
bulb and its remote in the beginning, but it's now mostly shining a calming
purple as the night light in my daughter's room. The Hue bulbs could have fulfilled that role
nicely too, except for one thing: if you turn them off with the wall switch,
they're back in white-light mode the next time you turn them on. They don't
"remember" their color.
The underlying
problem was that these "smart" lights forced us to do quite a bit of
thinking and controlling. They relied on us for much of the "smarts,"
and we just couldn't be bothered.
Maybe, one day, we
can get lights that will do what we want without being told, like dimming the
lights when the mood is right. You do the thinking, bulbs, and let us be dumb.
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