Hey everyone. I'm building an addition onto my house and one of the rooms will be a media room / living room. I'd like to have scene lighting and am looking for a good set of can / down lights to install during construction. Currently I'm looking at the Osram / Lighify brand, but I wanted to get your opinions. I have a pretty extensive z-wave network and just a handful of Zigbee, so either protocol should be fine. I'd like to stay away from Wi-Fi lights. Any info is appreciated.
Sengled BR30's Color+ have worked well for me - have 8 of them in the den. Zigbee is nice because if you group them you can take advantage of the "Zigbee Group Messaging" to reduce "popcorning".. delay in various lights turning on/off. Sengleds also do not "repeat" so are less likely to mess up your mesh.
I would also recommend you replace the switch with a smart switch as well - either Zooz or Inovelli, they both allow for disabling the load control - switching still registers, power to lights remains on which is something you would need.
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I'd go with dumb, dimmable LED bulbs, and a smart, in-wall dimmer switch.
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I would too but assume they wanted color changing ability as well... The den thing was a test / demo and we NEVER use the color aspect at all.
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@ogiewon, like what @erktrek mentioned, we are looking for color changing which complicates things dramatically. I would've totally just went with smart switch if we didn't want color changing.
Thank for the quick replies guys!!
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Same here... Except for Water Leak alarms, where all of my color table lamps turn blue to draw my attention to the issue.
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The problem with having a smart light fixture (they do exist) is that they will still have to be connected to a light switch. (My #1 home automation rule is that the lights still need to work when the hub isn't there).
So, your best bet is a smart switch, with a color changing bulb. When you want a scene, you setup a rule to turn the switch on, wait like 0.5 sec, and set the color and light level to what you want. When you turn off the scene, you setup a rule to set the light to a "default" value, wait like 0.5 sec, and then turn off the switch (assuming you have the light set to go to last state when power is restored.)
Personally, I like z-wave for switches and zigbee for color changing lights. I have a mixture of Hue and Sengled in my house...both work great.
For my media room, there were already "can lights" installed. I used THESE for my 6 inch cans (pick temperature)...then screw into the existing fixture bulb socked and look really nice finished.
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