Like the other user mentioned: depends on your setup.
I have recessed lighting throughout my house, so swapping to bulbs for all of them would have been an expensive pain. So I opted for smart switches. I got innovelli reds, because they were the best there was at the time. You can get them with any protocol you want (zigbee/zwave/wifi)
With a smart switch, you can control lots of lights with only one device. Originally I just added Shelly relays behind each switch, but I wanted the dimming capability of the innoveli.
If you do still want bulbs, nothing beats hue. But they are by far the most expensive.
As an alternative, we have found bulbs that can run tasmota with the MQTT integration to be perhaps the most reliable part of our smart home (as long as the hardware already had a descent CRI). I’ve heard good things about ESP home too, but we have not tried it.
If someone has some light bulbs that are laggy (due to cloud integrations) or a pain to use due to software, its worth checking out of tasmota or esp home can be installed on them to locally pair with something like home assistant. It turned a regretful purchase into a nice addition.
With that said, we don’t buy connected devices any longer without checking internet and cloud requirements first.
Tasmota is awesome. I flashed all my early Shelly devices with it. But now the native Shelly firmware is amazing, and it allows you to turn on local mqtt only. So I’ve stopped using Tasmota for everything besides the few devices flashed early and behind my wall switches. (I’m too lazy to pull them out)
Is it hard to flash bulbs with Tasmota? Don’t you usually need access to the pins? Or have an OTA option for updating the firmware?
The ones I had you could do it over the air, but some do require access to the pins. Even with soldering experience it is not approachable as bulbs are not packaged to be opened, it is part of why I check for offline or flash compatibility before buying as even the same “model” could have different hardware revisions. No info = avoid.
Like the other user mentioned: depends on your setup.
I have recessed lighting throughout my house, so swapping to bulbs for all of them would have been an expensive pain. So I opted for smart switches. I got innovelli reds, because they were the best there was at the time. You can get them with any protocol you want (zigbee/zwave/wifi)
With a smart switch, you can control lots of lights with only one device. Originally I just added Shelly relays behind each switch, but I wanted the dimming capability of the innoveli.
If you do still want bulbs, nothing beats hue. But they are by far the most expensive.
As an alternative, we have found bulbs that can run tasmota with the MQTT integration to be perhaps the most reliable part of our smart home (as long as the hardware already had a descent CRI). I’ve heard good things about ESP home too, but we have not tried it.
If someone has some light bulbs that are laggy (due to cloud integrations) or a pain to use due to software, its worth checking out of tasmota or esp home can be installed on them to locally pair with something like home assistant. It turned a regretful purchase into a nice addition.
With that said, we don’t buy connected devices any longer without checking internet and cloud requirements first.
Tasmota is awesome. I flashed all my early Shelly devices with it. But now the native Shelly firmware is amazing, and it allows you to turn on local mqtt only. So I’ve stopped using Tasmota for everything besides the few devices flashed early and behind my wall switches. (I’m too lazy to pull them out)
Is it hard to flash bulbs with Tasmota? Don’t you usually need access to the pins? Or have an OTA option for updating the firmware?
The ones I had you could do it over the air, but some do require access to the pins. Even with soldering experience it is not approachable as bulbs are not packaged to be opened, it is part of why I check for offline or flash compatibility before buying as even the same “model” could have different hardware revisions. No info = avoid.
I love my lutron Caseta gear. Integrates with home assistant and reverts to dumb. Expensive ass dimmer though, and they run on a proprietary hub.