I'm on a quest to remove Hue from my home. Not because I don't think the products are good.... I just don't find them worth the money. Mostly I've been using Nanoleaf, but they don't cover all the bulb sizes I need and, Ironically, Wiz helps here. Ironically because Wiz is also owned by Signify which also owns Hue and used to be Philips Lighting which is why they get to use the Philips name.
In this case, it was a series of 3 E14 candle bulbs I needed to go into, what I call, my Star Trek light, but is actually the Simrishamn, from Ikea. Now, why do I call it that? Well, there was in episode in The Original Series (TOS) of Star Trek called "Return to Tomorrow" where there are 3 globes that contain consciousnesses. These globes kind of reminded me of those.
Yet, after I bought this lamp, there is a scene in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach" where these very Ikea lamps are used the background of a bedroom scene, continuing a long history of Star Trek using modern furniture for props.
I digress.....
The Wiz, or Philips Smart LED's connected by Wiz, E14 bulbs are significantly lower in price than the Hue bulbs. Indeed, so far, I've found I can replace Hue with new products and resell my Hue 2nd hand for more than my new bulbs. Win! Win!
The newer Wiz bulbs all support Matter, over WiFi. I wish it was Thread and you'd think Signify would do that seeing as the Thread radio is the same as Zigbee, and they have lots of zigbee experience as that is what Hue runs.
In this case, I bought a dual pack, and a single pack as I needed 3 bulbs.
I must admit, they do feel more cheap than the Hue bulbs but, in this case, they are covered by globes so it doesn't matter at all.
Setting up Wiz bulbs in the Wiz App.
Now, first of all, don't be confused. There is Wiz and Wiz V2. You definitely want the V2. It really annoys me when vendors leave the old apps around.
When you have the app, you do need to create a profile or you can sign in with google or Facebook. 2 companies I wouldn't trust with my personal information, especially Facebook.
When you are in, it will ask for various permissions:
It does give some explanations, but I do not understand why location service enables it to find my IP addresses seeing as all my IP addresses are local to me being in the 192.168.x.x subnet.
I already had my first light bulb in place. It isn't an issue with the Wiz app, but when you find that you add to Matter, all the bulbs have the same name.... not the one you will set up in the Wiz app so, for clarify here, I found that adding one bulb at a time was a good idea.
After pressing "START" you then go into setting up WiFi and then the pairing with Wiz is basically done.
Now you get into some defaults for how it appears in the app, including the icon you wish to use and the name of the lamp.
And finally how you want it to act when it is powered on. In my case, I chose whatever its last status was, and then you set up your fade in and fade out parameters so it behaves more like a traditional bulb.
That's it! The product is now set up in the Wiz app. You can do a few other things if you wish, but I like to do all my control from a single place - Apple Home.
Setting up the Bulb in Matter
After the bulb is set up in Wiz, you can see "Settings" in the bottom right of the screen, then you will notice a tile labelled "Integrations", by clicking on that it will take you to everything Wiz supports... which actually seems to be just about everything except Apple Home, but now we can do that via Matter. So, click on the Matter tile....
and you will see the bulb I had set up in Wiz. By selecting that, it now shows me the QR code and the numeric code. I copied the numeric code.
Adding the Matter bulb to Apple Home
Now switching to the Apple Home app, you can see the bulb showing as "Wiz Candle". By selecting that, I am now prompted for the Set-Up code, which I'd copied from the Wiz App.
And, then the Home App just follows the normal procedure for adding accessories.
When all 3 were done, I just created a group and called it "Star Trek Lamp" which I use for turning it on and off.
I do use it in automations. When I turn on my TV, my TV, Denon Amplifier and Nanoleaf 4D comes on, my curtains close (SwitchBot via Matter on the Switchbot Hub 2) and my Star Trek Lamp comes on as shown at the beginning.
Thoughts
Well, I wouldn't buy a lot of these, as they use WiFi. Routers are much better these days at handling many objects, but still you can get to a point of swamping your routers if not careful. I wouldn't do a whole house in these. Also, they do not support Apple's Adaptive Lighting as that isn't supported by Matter. In my case, again, not an issue as I never used it for this lamp.
However, the Wiz bulbs are responsive and they work well not giving me any connection issues at all. They are supposed to have a capability of presence detection, but I haven't tried it as I don't want multiple places to do automations... it just becomes too hard to manage. Now, if Philips/Signify decided to make that capability exposed via Matter, that would be really cool. For now, though, they are a lower cost smart connected bulb from Philips/Signify.
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