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I’ve had an unacceptably high AFR with all LIFX bulbs, although I’ll concede their support is fantastic at shipping replacements to me. We’ve had about 20-22% f
by nixgeek 6y ago
I’ve had an unacceptably high AFR with all LIFX bulbs, although I’ll concede their support is fantastic at shipping replacements to me. We’ve had about 20-22% failure rate of bulbs within 2 years of ownership, seen across ~60 of them. In addition to that about another 20% have needed factory resetting once or twice in the same period, because they stopped interacting with WiFi and the first-party application in ways that just turning off and on again at the light switch didn’t fix.
In contrast to this we’ve had exactly one Philips Hue fail on us. Also cheerfully replaced for us. None of them have needed resetting and we have about the same # of light fixtures deployed. Probably the most annoying problem is Hue Play’s are prone to coil whine at 100% brightness on on certain scene colors, particularly those involving blue-white (6000K). Resolvable by going < 5000K or dropping to 90% brightness, I haven’t attempted to get warranty replacement for this issue but about 16/22 of my Hue Play’s are affected by the issue.
Integrated with Google Home it’s also common that some % of LIFX bulbs won’t respond to a “turn off all the lights” command, whereas Philips is very good at on/off even when the command involves large numbers of bulbs...
- anonfornoreason 6y agoI don’t know if I will ever understand how someone can write out a comment clearly indicating a massive pain in the ass (20 lightbulbs failing and requiring calls to tech support, RMA, etc), and not be using it to talk about how this whole industry is a nightmare.
- arp242 6y agoWell, the previous poster said the Philips ones work much better, so clearly it's not "the whole industry".
- anonfornoreason 6y agoI’ll concede the point on a technicality, but will still stand by my motivation behind that comment - increasing the maintenance requirements for normal life sounds like a terrible way to spend money, environmental impact, and time...
- arp242 6y ago"It works well" doesn't sound like "a technicality", but okay. Humans remember negative experiences much stronger than positive ones, and "it just works" isn't really something you tend to notice in the first place. There's a lot of bias here.
- tga 6y agoIf you buy a car that keeps on breaking down, will you talk about how the auto industry is a nightmare or will you just pick a different manufacturer next time?
- anonfornoreason 6y agoI am clearly bringing bias to this conversation, but I have dabbled with some smart items (hub, locks), and have a friend who is into them. It’s non stop fiddling and fixing from all my actual experiences. You also have to remember the negative externalities of extra e-trash affect everyone, so to read about yet another iot failure, it’s easy for me to continue to trash the whole industry.
- debian3 6y agoSame. All the lights in my house are the philips hue that I bought back in 2013. So far I have replaced 2 only. The last one was coming back on by itself... wierd to replace a lightbulb because it doesn’t want to be turn off...