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Smart lighting can stand to be a little smarter. In most cases, you can’t simply buy a smart bulb, screw it in, and start controlling it with your phone. Even our Editors’ Choice, the Philips Hue family, requires you to first connect the bulb to a hub, which acts as a gateway between it and your phone. The Eufy Lumos Smart Bulb White ($19.99) lets you schedule, remotely access, and adjust your home’s lighting without the need for a hub. And it does so via Wi-Fi, rather than Bluetooth like most hub-less bulbs employ. It even supports voice control via Amazon’s Alexa, although you don’t get an extensive third-party ecosystem like you do with Philips Hue. Still, it’s a great starting point for anyone interested in smart lighting.
Your Average Bulb
Visually, the Eufy Lumos ($10.39 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) looks like, well, a light bulb. It has a familiar dome shape on top with a standard E26 screw-in base. The top half is translucent white plastic. The bottom half is plain white, with some ridges toward the top and the Eufy logo in the middle. It measures 5.8 by 3.3 by 3.2 inches (HWD), and weighs 8.8 ounces, which is a tad larger than your typical bulb. So while it will screw into most fixtures, its height might be an issue with smaller lamps. I tested it with a relatively short lampshade and it peeked up over the top.
The Lumos reaches up to 800 lumens of brightness, about the same as a 60-watt bulb, and on par with the Philips Hue White. It’s dimmable, but you can’t change the color temperature; it’s fixed at a warm 2,700K. If you want a wider range of temperatures, Eufy sells a Tunable White bulb for $29.99 that goes from 2,700K to 6,500K, comparable with the Philips Hue White Ambiance. The Lumos has an estimated lifespan of about 18 years (based on three hours of use per day), lower than Philips Hue (23 years) and Ikea Tradfri bulbs (22 years).
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Left to right: Eufy Lumos Smart White, Philips Hue Color and White Ambiance, a regular Sylvania LED bulb
The best part about the Lumos is that you don’t need a hub to control it over Wi-Fi. Typically, most hub-free bulbs (like the MiPow Playbulb) use Bluetooth, which severely limits your range. The Lumos uses both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, enabling you to control it remotely. All you need to do is pair it with your phone via the EufyHome app.
Setup, App, and Performance
After downloading the app (available for Android and iOS), to get started you have to screw in the bulb and select it from the Add Devices tab, after which it should flash three times. Then you’ll be prompted to go to your Wi-Fi Settings and connect to the bulb directly. It only supports 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, but that’s not uncommon among smart home devices.
The app itself is fairly straightforward. The main screen shows you all of your connected devices, which you can tap to interact with individually or in groups. When you select a bulb, the top half of the screen shows you whether it’s on or off, as well as the brightness percentage. If there’s a particular setting you like, you can hit the heart in the lower right corner to add it to your favorites menu.
You can also program schedules. For example, I set the Lumos in my office lamp to turn on every weekday at 10 a.m., at 100 percent brightness. I also programmed it to turn off automatically after I left every night. There’s also an Away mode option. You select a start and end time, as well as the days of the week. During that period, the bulb will turn on and off randomly to create the appearance of someone being home.
I tested how well the Lumos handles remote commands. I turned it on, off, dimmed, and brightened the bulb while I wasn’t in Wi-Fi range, and had a colleague verify in real-time whether the bulb was behaving as it should. Sometimes it took a few moments for the change to take place, but that shouldn’t be a problem when you’re out of the house.
You can control the Lumos by voice using Amazon Alexa. To do so, you just have to enable the Eufy Home Alexa skill and link your account. After that, you can ask Alexa to the light on or off, or adjust its brightness. I tested this out with the Eufy Genie speaker, and had no problem controlling the bulb solely by voice. Another benefit to using Alexa is that you can group the Lumos with smart bulbs from different platforms (if you have some Hue bulbs, for instance). All you have to do is create a group of lights in the Alexa app and you can control them simultaneously.
I did experience some connectivity issues with the Lumos during testing. At first is struggled to stay connected to the Wi-Fi in PC Labs, and started blinking erratically as if it were a prop in Stranger Things. I re-paired the bulb, which fixed this issue. I suspect it had more to do with the crowded office Wi-Fi network than anything else.
If there’s one area the Lumos comes up short, it’s in third-party integrations. Aside from Alexa, the bulb doesn’t pair with any other smart home devices or services, like If This Then That. Philips Hue bulbs can be linked with a host of other products, so you can program them to alert you when your Uber arrives, for instance.
Conclusions
If you’re looking to give smart lighting a try, but aren’t ready to commit to an entire house of smart bulbs, the Eufy Lumos is a great place to start. Without a hub you can easily group lights, schedule them, and access them remotely. The app is easy to use, and voice control via Amazon Alexa is icing on the cake. If you’re looking to get serious about smart lighting, however, you can save yourself money in the long run by investing in a hub. Philips Hue White bulbs, for instance, go for $15 each, and boast a wider feature set than the Lumos. If you install multiple bulbs throughout your home, the required $60 hub will eventually pay for itself.
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The Eufy Lumos is a standalone Wi-Fi smart bulb you can control from anywhere using your phone. It works without a hub, and at $20, it’s a good way to try out smart lighting.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/eufy-lumos-smart-bulb-white