Philips Hue Bridge 2.0 (Works with Alexa), White. Smart Home Lighting System

Have purchased my first Hue light a 2m colour striplight (v4) snd a Hue bridge (v2). This was for my 10 yr old daughter's bedroom and she is very happy and excited. Pros and technicalities: Ovetall Very easy, simple and convenient setup. Easy to integrate with Alexa. Great product from Philips Hue. 5 stars You Must have downloaded P Hue app (Android, iOS) before installation. 1. Plug Hue bridge into power source 2. Attach bridge with rj45 cable to your network or router. 3. Open app on phone. It automatically detects Bridge, then updates it. 4. Beware it takes quite some time to update! (approximately 15 min) 5. Attach striplight to power 6. Search for Hue lights in app. 7. App detects striplight (very easy, first time, no lag, smooth) 8. Once integrated, it can be named whatever you like. Jojo, rattle, bindi, we settled for Griffin! App now updates Striplight (expect another 15 min to complete it). 9. App integrates with Amazon Echo Alexa seamlessly and works smooth with voice commands. 10. You can name the Room and lights in that room, so I guess you can add as many rooms (as you can spend) and lights in each room. (Total 50 with each Bridge as per manual). 11. You can set scenes and ask alexa eg: 'turn savana sunset in room 1', Perfect 12. You can set routines, timings when light to come and go with sunset and sunrise etc etc Cons and ideas for improvements: 1. Slightly less user friendly for complex settings ie setting routines and grouping lights in each room and then the whole house. It could be improved by adding icons instead of too much prose, (like somfy TaHoma app) 2. Voice commands for Echo: It wouldn't work if you say 'Set Savanna sunset Scene in Room1', instead you have to be Specific and say 'Turn Savanna sunset in room 1'. 3. Setting routines could be simplified: one example is you want lights control to be activated at night time commwncing with sunset and switch off with sunrise. This could be more user friendly in the Hue app as current a bit complex set up. Finally the price of the Hue lights is ridiculously HIGH, you pay a premium, (though no doubt Hue lights are amazing!). Probably it is due to lack of competition but in modern era soon expect other competitors with at par quality of lights and app to get into the ring... can Amazon start making its own colorful lights?!

Excellent . Been using for more than 5yrs. Excellent. Best. Reliable. Great

I bought this along with two of the bulbs separately to use with Amazon Echo... and boy am I glad I did. It's just so cool to be able to remotely control your lights, and is surprisingly more useful than you would think. The installation process was easy: Plug in the equipment, turn it all on, download the app, press a big button on the bridge. If you have Amazon Echo you just install that skill and discover the devices, that was it. Like I mentioned in my Amazon Echo review my son is a light sleeper and refuses to turn his bedroom light off. With this I can either leave the light on and slowly decrease how strong the light is or i can ask Alexa to turn the lights of later when I am sure he is asleep. My stairs are particularly creeky so if i walk upstairs to do this he wakes up easily. It can also be used to keep your home safe whilst you are away at work or on holiday. You can set the lights to come on at a particular time so it looks like you are home when it is dark, or away. This to me is a winner. The lights themselves are as bright as any other 60W bulb on the market, but are slightly longer that normal bulbs so factor this in if you have enclosed light fittings and check your measurements. They are also insanely expensive for some of the bulbs (between £15 to £25 and upwards depending on the bulb) but are they worth it, to me yes they are... especially if you have Amazon Echo as it really expands the experience. I'm not rich but love my tech and got some parts of the kit as a gift from family and can appreciate the cost on these (but they do last 25000 hours + which is a plus). On a side note you do not need to buy a starter kit to get the bridge to work if you are a first time user, you can start off by just buying this and then buying the bulbs separately if that's cheaper for you. I have read elsewhere people saying you need a starter kit and that this is just for upgrading from the V1 bridge, that is incorrect information On the whole with the price taken in to consideration I would still recommend this.

Bought this after erroneously thinking that the Amazon Echo negated the need for one - it doesnt, just a heads up. Currently using this with a single Hue White at the moment, but I hope to increase my collection of bulbs as money allows. The box updated on first connection, setup was a little tricky when creating bulbs and assigning rooms, but all in all it works well through the app. I find the Philips Hue app fine, people's mileage seems to vary, but it's been great for me and I've experienced no issues. I've set up my room, routines, this wakes me up nicely on a morning, and you can set it up to turn on/off through the day based on time. Although the device is a necessity, and very white, you can discreetly tuck it away somewhere due to it's small footprint. Remember that it doesn't need to be in the room that your lights are in to operate them, just on the house network. Overall, recommended.

This is an expensive venture, which goes without saying, really. You need the hub plus each of the lights you want. If, like me, you don't have B22 fittings, this makes for exceptionally expensive bulbs. Great experience though. I couldn't merit knocking the rating down to 4 stars due to the price because this is a given when you chose to go for the Hue line. I'll reserve my details of the other products to the review pages of the respective products, notably the Philips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting 2 m Lightstrip Plus LED Kit (Includes 1 x 2 m LED Lighstrip Plus, 1 x Power Adapter), Works with Alexa and bulbs ( Philips Hue White Ambiance Personal Wireless Lighting LED E14, Edison Screw bulb, Works with Alexa [Energy Class A+ ]) For the box itself you get one srew mounting hole on the back. Don't mount it on the wall first as you'll need to sync it up with the app before hanging it on the wall. The app tells you everything you need to do to set up the system, other than plugging it in. I was interested to see that the network cable was 2-pair, rather than the standard 4-pair. Evidently it doesn't need as much. I opted to use the cable that came with it, though a standard Ethernet cable works fine. The whole process it pretty seemless - just plug it in and follow the guide on the app. There's not much else to say about it, really. Overall, very pleased with the purchase, albeit an expensive venture. If you dont need automation or voice commands, consider getting RGB LED strips and/or dimmer switches as they're far, far cheaper than Hue.

Having used and discarded a few so called smart systems thanks to the tragic side of my early adopter failures I eventually ended up using Philips Hue. And by far its the best system out - with one caveat which, is the way the app is programmed isn't immediately intuitive. Once you understand it, it works well, but one has to understand the way in which Philips have created the system and their logic. Anyway, the basic idea is to fit this bridge or hub unit so that it can connect to the web which, is where it runs from being interfaced by the app on your phone or tablet. The hub then controls wirelessly the various lighting around your house - as long as you make sure they are switched on of course. The range of the hub is very good and compared to the likes of LightroomRF and Samsung Smart Things - both of which I have - the Philips Hue Bridge has the best range. That does not mean it covers my house because it's a bit larger than most and more importantly when I renovated it I used foil backed plasterboard thus creating a bit of a Faraday cage in various places. Doh! So I have three of these bridges and that's another winner over the likes of LightroomRF which does not allow this. You can fit many bridges so that dead spots can be covered effectively. It's not quite ideal on the app as you have to switch between bridges each of which is used to program the lights within it's zone of influence but of course once set up with routines you can forget about it anyway. Seamless integration with Alexa and that means voice control of your lights if you have some that you don't leave set on a routine. Overall a superb system.

Although our house is very much a “smart” home, I’m relatively late to the smart bulb party. I’m an immediate convert though. My review below details my own experiences of the Hue bulbs, which require this Hue Hub to function correctly. Over the last year I have slowly been changing as many of the bulbs in the house that I can. I have chose to go with the Philips Hue White Ambiance bulbs as they give the best combination of lighting options against cost that suit our requirements. Although there are a few benefits to the coloured bulbs, I see it more of a gimmick that you’ll quickly get bored of. Plus, not only are they considerably more expensive than the Ambiance bulbs, they’re also much bigger and don’t fit all light fittings quite so well, if at all. So, presently I have 7 GU10s, 4 B22, 4 E27 bulbs and 6 E14 bulbs dotted around the house and have space for several more in the coming months. The elephant in the room with these bulbs is the cost. There’s no getting away from the fact that they are expensive, even if you manage to pick them up on a Lightning Deal. That said, you’re paying for much more than a way of lighting your room. Smart homes are only limited by your imagination, and you can implement some pretty funky routines through the Alexa app if you’re brave enough to delve deeply. Beyond the Hue bulbs I have 12 TP Link smart sockets controlling things like the lights on my two fish tanks, I have 7 Echo dots, 2 Sonos Ones, a Logitech Harmony, Nest thermostat and two Nest smoke detectors. My Denon amp is connected by its HEOS app, and I have a couple of LG TVs with Alexa built in plus another with a Fire HD stick. Five internal IP cameras and 8 external cameras plus my recent addition of a Ring door camera. If thought through, all of these can be interlinked. For example, should the smoke detectors or door bell go off, I can have the Hue light bulbs dim or light up. If a motion sensor is tripped on one of the IP cameras, I can have the Hue bulbs in the patio lights come on. Additionally, even without working with other smart devices, the Philips Hue bulbs offer plenty of things on their own. The ability to gradually lower the light as the night goes on, and likewise gradually bring the light up as your morning routine begins. You can have lights come on as the daylight begins to fade, and set them to many different shades to suit your mood such as reading or night light, through Savanna sunset and white brilliance. You options are many and varied, and if you can look past the initial set-up costs, they can hugely enhance your home.

Very few problems with this box. Adding Hue lights is easy and more than one can be done at once which is great from larger rooms. Setting it up to work with my Harmony hub and google home was also no trouble at all. The is a lot of different functionality through the app as well and whilst some is gimmicky some has been very useful e.g. if 2 sensors are in one room, the lights will only turn off if both don't detect movement for a certain time. It is worth noting though that if the Hue servers go down then you'll lose remote and home assistant functionality, this has happened once. Though local control through Philips dimmers and the app still worked fine. I have also had occasions where once spot spot light out of 8 wont listen to a command the first time for lights further away from the box. To get around this issue I would recommend replacing lights nearest the box first and expanding out as the hue lights will help share commands from the bridge to lights out of signal distance. The box is also quite light, I can't fault them for this but just be aware if it's going on a tall counter, wedging it or some simple adhesive might be needed to counter the weight of the cables.