WiZ smart lighting review: the better, cheaper option

Cons

Verdict

For years I’ve used LIFX bulbs in my home and put up with fairly frequent Wi-Fi connection problems because of the quality of the colours they produce.

Many cheap smart lights don’t do white very well, and really struggle with colours such as yellow and orange because of the cheap, inferior LEDs they’re built with. They also tend to have awful apps which are badly designed and frustrating to use.

Enter WiZ Connected: a range of affordable smart lights that can do proper whites and colours and also have a great app that you’ll want to use to control them.

WiZ lights make LIFX – and Philips Hue – bulbs look overpriced (which they are, really). And WiZ is now owned by Signify, the company that used to be called Philips Lighting and which also makes Philips Hue bulbs.

In fact that WiZ bulbs used to be sold as Philips WiZ Connected, but have since dropped the Philips branding.

One key difference between Hue and WiZ is that WiZ lights don’t require a separate bridge. So even if you only plan to buy a couple of bulbs, you don’t have to spend extra for more hardware. And there are remote controls available if you want them.

Plus, WiZ lights offer a few bonuses, including SpaceSense, that you won’t find elsewhere.

The range

The choice of bulbs and lights is impressive given that WiZ has only been around a few years.

In addition to the standard white and colour bulbs for screw and bayonet fittings, the range also includes GU10 spotlights and E14 (Small Edison Screw), retro filament bulbs, LED strips, plus many actual light fittings, known in the trade as luminaires.

There are spotlights, ceiling lights (such as the brilliant Rune), wall lights, a floor ‘pole’ light and table lamps. There’s even a battery-powered lantern and, just recently, the first-ever outdoor addition to the range, the String Lights.

The choice of indoor lights, then, is excellent.

For this review, I asked WiZ to send over a selection of these to test out, including the Linear, a bar light that’s designed to provide a ‘wall wash’, GU10 spots, screw-in colour bulbs, the Rune dual-zone ceiling light, the portable, battery-powered lamp and the outdoor String Lights.

Jim Martin / Foundry

All deliver similarly good light quality. The only one that proved tricky to use was the Rune as it has separate lights for whites and colours: the strip around the edge is colour-only and the main panel handles whites. The app isn’t really set up for this, so getting the combination of white and colour that you want isn’t easy.

Jim Martin / Foundry

It was slightly disappointing that the lowest colour temperature for white is 2700K when all the other WiZ bulbs go down to 2200K, but that’s a minor gripe. (The photo above makes the white light look much warmer than it actually is.)

The Mobile Portable Light is great for a variety of reasons, including the fact there are several dual-zone presets you can toggle between using the button on top, and there’s a useful touch-sensitive slider for quickly adjusting brightness. Battery life at full brightness is about three hours and, oddly, there’s no way to see the battery charge level, even in the app. It’s best to turn it off using the switch underneath, as leaving it ‘on’ and connected to Wi-Fi will drain the battery even if the light itself is off.

Jim Martin / Foundry

However, it was the String Lights that I liked most. Each of the 12 LEDs is separated by a metre of chunky wire and, of course, they are weatherproof. You’ll need to install them where the box near the end of the cable has a decent Wi-Fi signal.

Jim Martin / Foundry

As you might guess, the dynamic modes really come alive on the String Lights, with party mode being ideal for traditional bright colours. But the white modes are also great, with subtle but noticeable changes in the Golden White mode. Steam Punk is great, too.

WiZ says each light produces 10 lumens for a total of 120, but they seemed brighter than that to me.

Jim Martin / Foundry

WiZ app

As there’s Bluetooth as well as Wi-Fi in each light, setup is amazingly easy. The app lets you add individual lights manually, but can also detect multiple new lights, prompt you to name each and choose which room they should be a part of.

I began using V1 of the app, even though I knew V2 was due to be released. What I didn’t realise is that V2 is not an update: it’s a completely separate app. That’s a strange decision, but as wholesale changes were made, it’s nice to have to option to be able to use the old one if you prefer it.

Jim Martin / Foundry

And whether you like V1 or V2, both are among the best apps for any smart lights, besting the LIFX app in quite a few ways.

It’s sensibly based around rooms rather than individual lights. Once you’ve created rooms and named them, such as lounge and kitchen, you can then easily set a colour and brightness for each.

Of course, if you’ve bought lights that support colours and not just white, then there are a host of them to choose as well. But where the WiZ app really shines is in the dynamic modes, which are readily accessible (unlike in the LIFX app, for example).

Jim Martin / Foundry

In fact, in V2 of the app, it’s easier to set a dynamic mode than to pick a specific colour. They’re split into White and Colour, with two Progressive modes (wake up and bedtime).

Simply tap on one of the options and all the lights in that room will constantly change colour, using colours appropriate to the mode you’ve picked. Go for Party, and you’ll get bright primary colours, while Fall includes oranges and yellows.

A slider at the bottom adjusts brightness, but you can tap on Speed to get a slider to adjust how quickly or slowly those colours change.

As you might guess, these work best when you have at least three or more lights in a room, and don’t really make sense if you have just one.

If Dynamic modes don’t appeal, you can pick shades of white from cool to warm or any colour you like.

A separate tab, Automation, allows you to schedule when lights turn on and off. This could be improved. It forces you to choose a specific start and end time, and has no options to, for example, turn on lights 30 minutes after sunset.

It also forces you to turn all the lights on in a particular room: there’s no option to select which ones you want.

If you want to turn a room on and off more than once per day, you’ll have to create a separate schedule for each period, and there’s no way to duplicate them.

You can, at least, choose which colour, white or dynamic mode you want, and brightness.

Jim Martin / Foundry

Some of the missing features there are mitigated somewhat by the Rhythms option. By default there is only one: Circadian.  This is probably the only one you need, and it changes the colour of the lights according to the time of day, so cool in the morning, then gradually getting warmer in the afternoon and into the evening, just like real daylight.

The beauty of this is that you can turn lights on and off at will and when you turn them back on, they’ll adjust to the appropriate colour for the time of day as long as Circadian Rhythm is enabled for the room.

Better still, you can pick in the app what happens when light switches (or power switches) are used. This is called ‘WiZclick’ and allows you to set up two modes which kick in when you flip the switch once or twice.

For example, you could set one to ‘warm white’ at a specific brightness, and the other to a dynamic mode at a different brightness.

This could be useful if you prefer to use switches to control your lights: faster than using the app.

You can even set how long the lights take to fade on and off, which is a particularly nice option to have, and you can do all this per light.

It’s worth noting that with WiZclick disabled, the light will always go back to its previous state when the switch is used. In other words, if it was set to blue at maximum brightness when it was turned off, it’ll be exactly that when turned back on.

Another useful option is “Power outage recovery” which stops all your WiZ lights turning on after a power cut. They’ll only turn back on if they were on before the power outage.

SpaceSense is a new feature that uses the bulbs’ Wi-Fi to ‘sense’ when movement is detected in a room and use this as a way to automate lights without buying separate motion sensors.

Jim Martin / Foundry

See also  Mavix M7 review

I spent some time testing this and found that it depends upon where you place the lights in a room as to whether it works well or not.

For a start, you need at least two lights in a room, and one needs to be near the centre, with other at least 2m away. That immediately caused a problem in room I wanted to use because I have four GU10 spotlights, one in each corner.

I tried to pick one as the ‘beacon’ and the others as the ‘processors’ but even though the calibration process appeared to work ok, detection proved unreliable.

There’s a sensitivity slider, but even with it set quite high, it mostly failed to detect anyone moving, and didn’t switch on the lights.

Yet, on occasions, the lights in that room would be on when no-one was home, suggesting they’d been triggered by the cat or dog.

Ultimately, you’ll need lights in the optimal positions and to use trial and error to get the right sensitivity. It’s a nifty feature, but not one you should count on.

Integrations

Last but not least are all the integrations. You can probably guess Alexa and Google Assistant support, but there’s also IFTTT, Samsung SmartThings, Enki, Alice, Magenta SmartHome, Ozom, Homey, Marusya and iflares – many of which you won’t have heard of.

I spent most time using the Alexa integration and found it worked reasonably well. You can’t ask Alexa to set any Dynamic modes, which is expected, but the big disappointment was the mismatch between Alexa and WiZ colour names.

It’s a problem I haven’t experienced with LIFX or Hue bulbs, but when you ask Alexa to set WiZ lights to, say, pink, you’ll actually get a whitish purple. You have to say “Alexa, set lounge to dark pink” to get normal pink. And it’s similar with orange, yellow and other colours.

The big omission, and surely one reason why WiZ bulbs are cheaper, is the lack of support for HomeKit. This means those with Apple hardware can’t easily control WiZ lights with Siri, or from their iPhone Control Centre.

Price & availability

WiZ bulbs start at around $10 / £10 for a simple dimmable white bulb and $12.99 / £12.99 for a colour A19 / E27.

A 2m LED strip kit costs $45 / £45, and the Linear (with two lights) costs $84.99 / £79.99.

Speciality lights are more expensive: $119.99 / £109.99 for the String Lights and £129.99 for the Rune Ceiling light.

You’ll find the range on sale at Amazon, as well as other retailers including Walmart and Home Depot in the US, and Very, B&Q, Argos and John Lewis in the UK.

Verdict

If you’re trying to decide on a smart lighting system and want something that’s relatively inexpensive yet is still great quality – and easy to use – then WiZ certainly fits the bill.

In fact, it’s one of the only options that ticks all those boxes and also has a broad range of bulbs and light fittings to choose between.

The outdoor options are rather lacking, but hopefully WiZ will expand that side of the range now the String Lights are out.