Review: Philips Hue Lighting – Creating the Perfect Mood

When Thomas Edison showed the world the fruits of his labours from inside his New Jersey laboratory in the late 1800s, never could he have imagined just how much one man’s engineering would change the world.

Philips Electronics has for decades now been custodians of Edison’s legacy, making billions of light globes for residential and commercial purposes.

With the Philips Hue range of connected LED globes, lamps, light strips and accessories, your home (or office) has access to an almost infinite range of lighting for any mood that you’re trying to create.

Like most Smart Home additions, it’s best to start small and work out what works best for the way you live. The Philips Hue range has a number of Starter Kits that give you everything you need to brighten (and dim) your home.

One of the best features of the Philips Hue range is the inclusion of a ‘hub’ that acts as the controller for all your compatible globes and lights. We’ve tested many smart lights at Sonny Dickson and having a physical hub makes setup and management so much easier. One of the key reasons is that you can connect the hub to your WiFi router via an included LAN cable – meaning no complicated WiFi set-up.

Once the hub is connected and you see the blue lights you’re ready to connect. Each light (globe) can be named and associated with a room – or in my case, they are all allocated to the Living Room. You can even specify individual colours and brightness for each globe.

The biggest challenge in my home was to match the ‘warmth’ of the Philips Hue lights to the rest of the lighting in the Kitchen and Dining Room which all run traditional 28W halogen light globes. I downloaded the Philips Hue app and took advantage of the Scene Gallery where a vast array of customised colours and levels of brightness are available in a single tap.

From the Scene Gallery, it’s a couple of additional taps to enable Automations and connect your Philips Hue lights to Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or Apple Home Kit. For those with a little apprehension towards full-blown home automation, the Philips Hue lights are also compatible with very useful dimmer switches that look more like remote controls.

Taking it one step further, the Philips Hue lights are open to Developers creating brilliant third-party apps such as Hue Music that let you do this!

If you’re looking to add some energy saving (up to 80% over normal light globes) and automation technology to your home, the Philips Hue range is the perfect accessory that delivers beautiful warm lighting that easily transitions to colour and fun when the mood strikes you.

I’ve already added to our selection at home ready for the next birthday celebration!

The Philips Hue range is available directly from Philips or from Bunnings and JB Hi-Fi.