Lighting Deals & Offers

In fairness I'm not in the situation whereby I have to rely on many smart bulbs, so don't face congested frequencies. At last count though, we had 50+ WiFi enabled devices and we're yet to struggle on a BT mesh with router turned off. The archer and bt routers preceding it didn't have any issues either on solely 2.4GHz and mixed with 5GHz later on. Most smart home devices are 2.4GHz in my anecdotal experience. I do wonder where - if at all - someone has too many WiFi smart devices for their home router and it's causing real issues. For us, we buy smart light switches, as we have a new build with neutral wires in the light sockets. So a kitchen with 14 GU10 bulbs or bedroom with 8 GU10 bulbs can be served with a single Sonoff smart switch to each room for £10-£15 each. Lucky for me I suppose! No dimming, temp or colour control, but I think most likely, people who benefit the most are niche and possibly not using those feature sets all the time. If a standard ZigBee protocol can be developed that serves a multitude of devices, sure, I'll sign up if needed. But right now, it's a bit more miss than hit and people stick to a single ecosystem, whether that's Philips or otherwise for combined feature sets etc.

Most people call their internet connection "WiFi" and wouldn't know an IP address from a subnet mask. More than a couple have their routers behind their TV and complain their "Internet is slow". If they're short on physical ethernet ports, they can pick up a switch for £7 on Amazon or get metal gigabit one from Asda for £15. More devices using a wifi channel, the slower that wifi channel is for all devices. A slight oversimplification, but a generally accurate one. People aren't using Wi-Fi 6 smart bulbs. Most are 802.11ac at best. Zigbee is a superior choice generally for bulbs from every perspective. They aren't on the same channel as your WiFi (when configured correctly), they use less power (both in a wattage and decibel sense), they mesh effectively (which works brilliantly). We've got about 20 smart bulbs in the house, and 20+ other directly IP-connected devices. Could we have used all WiFi bulbs? Yes. Would it have been a sensible choice? No. Should most people use WiFi bulbs if they're putting in more than a handful bulbs? Generally no.

I've expired this, don't want to help them generate sales. Within 6-7 hours, the price hiked gradually from £18.50 to £24, this is a joke. The price was £18.50 since days ago. At every hour after I've posted this, they put the price up more or less by £1. May still be an OK price, but I don't like these practices, they did the same with the 2 pack E27.

They're fine for in excess of 100+ devices wirelessly in plenty of standard routers. You'll still have plenty of traffic going to/from the router from mobile devices etc via the hub. Find me a house with 150+ WiFi devices running simultaneously being the norm. Then find me an example of where a hub solves this instantly. Hardly any homes have that many devices. Those that do will provision for it. Most people would rather one of the four ports on their ISP provided router weren't consumed.

Now you're really showing your ignorance, it's the huge amount of extra traffic through the router that affects it, not what's in the airwaves, and many consumer grade routers just can't cope with a very large number of devices.

No worries. Never pay full price though!

This is very helpful, thank you so much

Theyre very bright and go very dim too. 800 lumens. Recommended!

£119.99 now...

Apologise my ignorance but anyone can tell me how bright those bulbs are? Or how I can compare them to regular bulls?

sweet cheers for the ebay tip.

Deal available on ebay for brand new ones!

Anyone know if these are Richer Colours? Is that still something to look out for are are they all RC by standard now?

Ebay!

Usually you can find the bridges on eBay.

Thanks both for your advice

Removes the dilemma of whether to take the plunge for me at least (lol)

Up to £799 now, which was still considered a 'deal' price recently but there are currently several places to pick one up for that price. That wasn't the case yesterday though, so still not a bad price if someone was looking to buy.

Best camera I ever had and at this price it is superb. I have a feeling they are clearing stock for a new model to arrive. I might by a second body near October before I go (hopefully) on Safari again. And indeed the new FW is superb and added most GH5 features to the G9.

if you get one update the firmware as lots of extra options. Also look at some of the kits e.g. with Leica lens, extra grip, batteries etc. it's a great camera, love mine.

Thanks so much, but even that says back ordered? Is that because they expect a percentage of today’s orders to be returned?

Yeah just bought some from amazon warehouse similar price.

Some used like new here.

HOW DID I MISS THIS? It’s all I’m here for! ;(

Left it in basket :( :(

Thank you very much for this. I’m mainly thinking about standard on/off switches, and whether it’s safe to just keep using those in some rooms for simple on/off and using the power-on-behaviour to set back to bright setting. I’ve added a couple of hue dimmers and hue motion sensors for some rooms, but don’t want to spend on hue switches for every room, so we are all tending to fall back to the normal switches most of the time. Good to hear though that it shouldn’t cause issues. Thanks

Through laziness, I have left dimming light switches in place where I have fitted hue bulbs (I must get around to changing them out). To be clear, you cannot use a standard dimmer switch to lower the brightness of a hue bulb. If you accidenlty knock the dimmer so that it is not fully on, the hue bulb will start flickering. I should imagine that the bulb rectifies the AC mains before using an regulating the dc voltage applied to the LED(s). There will be a lot of high speed switching going on in the bulb and it probably does not like the AC being supplied to it being modulated at high frequency as a conventional dimmer does. In theory the dimmer switch when fully on should be supplying an unmodulated AC mains voltage and pose no issue (though that might vary with differing dimmer technologies as there have been more sophisticated types for non-hue LED bulb use in recent years) I've seen no failures in a few years of use, but it's certainly not 'best practice' to leave a normal dimmer switch in place.

Anyone know if using the normal light switches instead of app/dimmer/sensor will degrade the life of the bulbs?

Would work fine, but the e14 and gu10s have a lower light output (40w equivalent) than e27/b22 (60w equivalent). Something like 670 lumen peak vs around 800 lumen.

Would the E14 bulbs work okay with an adapter to E27? As these bulbs are quite a bit smaller. Seems like a great price and much cheaper than E27 atm!

Have one in babies nursery and is great for the middle of the night nappy changes

How can a boiled egg help you sleep? XD

Link?

Got the LE torch/Lamp that was on the other day . Have to say the build quality is really good .

Paid £14.99 for mine and works well.

I bought this a while ago and it is excellent.