Philips Hue Lighting

[circular]

Are sure you want to admit that publicly SusanJ, photo and all? ... (Glad you get me )

[Nequals1Guy]

I wear super cool Swanwick glasses
https://www.swanwicksleep.com

These glasses block the blue light, thus eliminating the need to buy expensive bulbs.

Consumer Reports found that the cheapest pair of blueblockers blocked the most blue light. I'm sure you can Google and find the article I'm referencing.

....but if you want to look cool you'll want the Swannies.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[circular]

I can't decide if that's cool looking or a ticket to an insect convention But they are better looking than some others I've seen. Does blue light get in through the sides?

Last night I got tripped up over how the Hue lights would work if I have them on a phone app setting and my husband wants to override it at the switch. Not good. They will come on full brightness. I'm thinking of just some strategic lamps/lights, independent of our main switches, that are run by phone app, so no special switch plate needed. These would be the lighting foundation in the evenings and early mornings, mostly mood lights (say, Hue strips above and below kitchen cabinets and behind TV ...), while manual use of our normal lights as needed wouldn't interfere with Hue and vice versa. I haven't worked the details out yet in my head, but I definitely wouldn't pay to replace our whole lighting scheme.

Last night with my blue blocking night light on I realized that the whole house being that dark from sundown to bed time would be pretty dysfunctional, although I've been going to bed closer and closer to sundown anyway. The work in progress continues ...

[Julie G]

Circ, I can't tell you how much I've appreciated this thread. It's very timely for me with my house renovation (ugh!) Like N=1, I'm doing great with my blueblockers at night. As a matter of fact, I sleep amazingly well if I wear them religiously from 7PM on. I'm encountering several problems with them, but one relates very well to this topic. I'm frustrated when I have to remove my blueblockers to take out my contacts and wash my face in the evening. The blue light is very harsh and undoubtably disturbs the good mojo I had going on with my cool specs. I can wash my face in the dark, but I can't remove contacts in the dark. I've decided to have a small hole drilled in the center of my bathroom vanity countertop so that I can have a small lamp between the sinks with one of these bulbs installed. That way I can freely take off my glasses without stumbling around in the dark. No app needed = happy inner Luddite

[circular]

Haha, by the way I really do get the Luddite groove! Truly, less is more in so many ways, and I often say a lot less is a lot more.

Have you considered using one of the night lights I linked to? No blue light. I have one above my bathroom sink and another above my husband's bathroom sink (he goes 'a long way to Tipperary' to have his own bathroom ). We also have two placed near the floor in hallway outlets that connect the bathrooms. He says he hasn't tried taking his contacts out with only that nightlight, but he thinks it would work if his eyes are adjusted. You could have your goggles on (sorry can't resist ) all evening and then turn the night light on before taking them off to do your bedtime ablutions. About $12 and no hole in the counter. A lamp is a nice touch too though

[Julie G]

What girl doesn't love options? So now it comes down to the lamp.... An amazing one will tilt me towards drilling into my new quartz. It's hard being ancestral cave girl in a modern world. Glad we're all struggling with this together.

[sarahb12]

One thing I'm leery of on LED light is one possible way to control the amount of light or color (with multipless colors) is by pulse width modulation - flashing them on and off. I've used this technique myself in designing backlights for displays. Supposedly they do fast enough that the brain doesn't detect that the light is flashing on and off. But it can still cause the eyes to fatigue. In fact non LED lights do this at 50 to 60 hertz. It bothers the countries at 50 hz more than us.

[circular]

Hi sarahb, thanks for sharing that. I didn't know they did the flicker thing. Is it constant? I always hated the traditional fluorescent lights for this, and they definitely tired and strained my eyes. A former employer installed one in the ceiling of my office one day when I was out. Not good.

I've been using the Hue lighting since my last post here. I now have one bulb in my office floor lamp, one in the guest bedroom table lamp, one in the living room floor lamp, and six in the kitchen can lights.

I can say I haven't noticed any eye fatigue they way I have the bulbs set, and I'm using them at varying light settings (I don't use the color feature much). There are some preset scenes or you can make your own from scratch using the color palette. For simplicity for now I've been working with preset scenes. One is for 'concentrate'. Once a scene is activated you can adjust the percentage light for that scene. Left alone at 100% this would definitely strain my eyes, but when I lower the percentage output I can find the right balance for me and then save the edited scene. No eye strain doing this so far that I'm aware of.

I find 'concentrate' at a lower percentage than the default incredibly useful in the floor lamp by my desk. It's even more useful coupled with brain.fm app's 'focus' tracks. Combining these with Alpha GPC and my 'desk ADD' is virtually gone. (Other forms of choline didn't work for me ... I have some bad choline SNPs and tried Alpha GPC after reading it's in the form our body uses so it seems I really may have a glitch in my system that doesn't work well with choline precursors.) If I happen to be headachy (I get ocular migraines) I can adjust the light and keep working, something I couldn't do before.

I have a program set to switch this office light to deep, warmer tones at 7 pm. The program fades the lamp to off between 9:30 and 10:30. This program helps discourage me from using my computer much in the evening because the lighting is too low, and if I'm using it between 9:30 and 10:00, by the time it is nearly faded out it has lulled me into readiness for bed. No matter how interested I am in what I'm doing, I am suddenly, psychologically done. If I'm not in the office when I go to bed, I just leave it on and it's off by 10.

I now have six BR30s in my kitchen ceiling. They are newer and I'm still working with what type of light I like there at what times of day and evening. I'm playing with programs ('routines') for these lights that switch from a brighter but still warm, more task-oriented light around dinnertime, a dimmer version for dishes etc, and a warmer yet version for the remaining time before going to bed.

The nearby living room floor lamp is set to warmer during all these evening hours and also fades out between 9:30 and 10:00.

The living room and kitchen lights are also on a morning program. They go on at 3:30 am since my husband is usually up from 3:30-4:00. They go off at 6:30 am when the light is no longer needed. I will have to edit the programs as the seasons change. This means my husband isn't using the dining light that uses more electricity at this time.

There is a great default scene for nightlight but I haven't been needing it.

I love the notion that for the next x decades I will barely use any electricity for lighting. Not sure how many years it will take for that to pay off these expensive bulbs though

There's a program that will randomly turns lights on and off while you're away, or you can just leave your regular programs running.

Philips provides some easy-to-install wall dimmers with default scene buttons and the like, but they go on the wall next to your regular switches. I don't want that, but I found some instructions for replacing a switch with a Lutron dimmer and how to make it work with Hue. I haven't done this yet, since I want to know more about how it would work with the system.

There's another type of remote gadget they sell where you can program three or four buttons for different scenes for the bulbs in a room. I haven't looked into how this works yet. I think it too can be stuck to the wall or left lying around like a remote.

For the best control over blue light in the evening I highly recommend getting the color bulbs, not white ambiance. White ambiance will reduce blue light in the evening substantially over regular bulbs, but the color bulbs are more customizable as far as bringing more red in and shoving more blue out at the lower kelvin levels.

The not so good ...

So far there are no exterior or wet area (bath) bulbs but they come out with new products periodically. I'm hopeful.

If you turn the light on at the switch rather than using the programs through the phone app, it will come on very bright. If there aren't too many people in the household, like mine with just two of us, it's easy to set programs we can both just have in place and not typically use the switches so this doesn't happen, but I think this could be a challenge in a home with four people who want the lights on at different times. In that case, if everyone can agree on what type of light, the lights could just be on other than daylight hours and left alone.

At first I was annoyed that sometimes my phone network at home would show as my wireless printer, and then the Hue app wouldn't work. I'd have to go in and get on the right network to change anything in the app. The phone would still just access the internet using cellular. I turned off wireless printing and now just use email to printer (HP), but the easiest thing is to make sure to set up Hue app control while away from home. That will work whether in or out of the house as long as you're still logged in using the distance control feature, except that now my app is exhibiting an issue where it says I'm logged in but also that there's no connection. Have to figure out how to clear this. [Edit: quick fix ... in the app log out and log back in. The app will have given you the option to save your email and password making this very easy. I'm not sure how often this little glitch will occur. It may be due to having turned my phone completely off and back on recently.]

It's a bit of an inconvenience when I do need to use the app to make an adjustment. The last thing I need or want is another reason to pick up and look at my phone screen. There are some shortcuts in the iPhone notification center to the custom programs could be helpful turning on/off custom settings that aren't on a routine.

Another inconvenience I haven't tackled yet is what if anything to do when guests are visiting. Maybe for starters I will get one of those 3-4 button things for the guest room and show them their options for lighting in there depending which button they push. That way the wall switch would just be left on and they'd control the light with that gizmo.

I don't like the gadgetness of it all, whether it's something extra stuck on the wall or having to use the phone app, so I'm working to keep it simple and low maintenance with automatic programs as I learn how to set up and tweak them. There's a bit of a learning curve/adjustment, but so far it's getting simpler and I really like having this level of control over the light quality itself from space to space and time to time. It's also helping me with my discipline issues getting to bed before 10 if not 8-9. I've found earlier is much better for my sleep and day overall. No eye fatigue yet, in fact I have much less over the old non-LED GE Reveal bulbs I was using which more or less mimicked full spectrum light but was the same day in and evening out.

Would I go back to incandescent, GE Reveal or 'single state' LED bulbs? Not a chance! I have found the tradeoff for me is in favor of using Hue bulbs for the light control. Am I moving on to Echo or Google Home and the like ... geesh, I have my luddite pride you know