The biggest thing I’ve learned while looking into Smart Home devices is that while manufacturers will generally inter-mingle, it’s always best to get devices from the same manufacturer instead of mixing and matching. Though Amazon and Google have done a great job of uniying devices under one common hub, outside of the basic on and off functionality it’s a pain to manage advanced settings and schedules using different apps.
Right now, I’m in the process of phasing out my first-gen Insteon lights and hub and am auditioning eufy lights, since they are hubless and due to the fact that I own a few eufy smart home devices (the Genie, a connected Robovac, and a Smart Plug), it made sense. I don’t really use the Genie that much because I own three Google Home devices strewn throughout the house, but I bust it out every now and then to test Alexa. At any rate, I ended up testing out this Lumos Smart Bulb, and chose the White & Color version because I’ve always been curious about the Philips Hue bulbs and these are typically $10-15 less.
The bulbs came packed really well; the heavier cardboard stock they used meant that the bulb came in securely through the mail. It came with the bulb and some associated paperwork, which I immediately ignored because my philosophy was that smart home devices will live and die on how easy they are to set up. Sure enough, the eufy Lumos did not disappoint.
All I had to do was wait for the bulbs to “boot up”, connect to its associated WiFi network, flip to the eufyHome app, click on the big plus button, and I was all set. The Lumos supports 2.4Ghz networks only, which makes sense anyways because 5GHz tends be less reliable the further away a device is from the router. Setting the lights up with Google Home was equally painless, since I already had the eufyHome app connected to my Google Home account, it detected the lights automatically and I was able to issue commands like “turn off the living room lights,” “dim the living room lights to 20 percent,” or even “make the living room lights blue.” This was great because my intent was to use these color and dimmable lights to enhance movies by switching to an appropriate hue.
The app does offer some more tunable settings that may be of interest to some. It has four modes: Color (lets you pick RGB colors off a palette by simply swiping across to the appropriate color), White (same as color but limits the palette to warm and cool shades of white for a more traditional lighting experience), pulse (which fades through different colors), and music (which turns on the mic and pulses the lights depending on what’s playing). The music mode in particular is probably cool if you have kids around and want to start an impromptu dance party, but I think the rest of us will stick to the white and color modes, which are both really serviceable.
The one weird thing I ran into while testing these lights was that it completely forgot the WiFi network out of the blue, after having it flipped off for a while. I’m not sure if it was a fluke, but it never happened again. To be fair, this was right after a new firmware update was installed so it could be related. Apart from that, these lights are brilliant (see what I did there?). If I can get a good deal on a set of the non-color lights, my Insteon setup is as good as gone.
