Before You Buy Guy here.
This channel is all about helping you make a more informed decision for your next technology purchase.
Today I'm taking a look at this sensor light from Xiaomi.
I've spent the last few weeks researching this light and finding out everything that you might want to know before you buy this item.
In this video i'm going to weigh up the pros and cons for this device.
I'll talk about the battery life, how well the light performs and I'm also going to talk about how much light is produced by this little device.
And overall, give you a good summary to help you decide if this is a good item for you to spend your money on.
Don't go anywhere. Let's get started.
So in the box with this light, you are going to get 1 rechargeable night light, 1 user guide
and you get 1 charging cable. And 1 mounting back plate.
At the back of the light, is a small plastic plate which attaches to the device with a small magnet.
The back plate has got quite a strong magnet that'll attach to this bracket
and then you can essentially attach that bracket anywhere you like around your house.
You can stick it on a wall, anywhere you want to stick this, you should be able to attach it with the adhesive pad.
I purchased this on eBay and the product dimensions weren't actually listed on the eBay listing.
So in case you're wondering, the product dimensions are 7cm x 2.5cm and it weighs 73 grams.
You don't need to buy a separate battery to operate this light.
It comes with its own built in, rechargeable battery.
Now this is a 750mAh battery and it's advertised to last up to 120 days;
I've been using this on and off for the last few weeks and it hasn't needed recharging yet.
There's 3 different settings on the switch; Off, Auto and On.
So when it's switched off - no light at all, and the sensor won't be triggered.
When the light is switched to auto it'll switch on when motion is detected.
The motion sensor is really good at detecting when you are in range.
You can switch the light to 'On', and when it's on, the light will stay on regardless of if there''s motion there or not.
So one of the things I noticed right away, when switching this from Auto to On,
was it's much brighter on 'On' mode than it is on 'Auto' mode. It's actually about twice as bright.
I'll come back to that a bit later. In the 'On' mode, the light will stay on all the time.
So you could pick this up and walk around with it like a torch.
At the bottom of the light here, you'll see one micro usb charging port.
To charge this, you will need a micro usb cable and there is one included in the box with your device.
One of the features I was quite impressed by is the light seems to be able to tell somehow, whether it's light or dark.
When you've got the main light on in the room where this light is set up, and you walk into the room,
the motion detector isn't just going to go off and start turning the light on, it actually only turns on when it detects motion and it's actually dark.
That's really handy for saving batteries and it'll help your batteries last closer to, maybe even the whole 120 days of advertised battery use.
It's only going to activate when it's actually needed
instead of switching on all the time when it detects motion, but there's actually plenty of light in the room.
The motion sensor can detect movement from up to 7 meters away from the front and 3 meters away from the side.
So depending on how you set this up, will depend on how far away you will need to be to actually trigger the device.
Another really great feature of this light is there's multiple ways to mount it.
I already mentioned you can mount this using the sticky mount.
You can also attach this device directly to any magnetic surface like a fridge, a dishwasher
or an oven as long as you've got a metal surface that you could normally attach a magnet to.
You should be able to just stick this straight on there which is really handy if you need a light to get access to the fridge for a midnight snack.
So you've got the sticky mount and the magnetic mount, but in addition to that
you also have a hook here if you don't want to commit to a specific location with the sticky mount
and you don't want to use the magnet mount either, you can hook this device using the hook.
You could hang this in your closet, you can hang this over a door handle, anywhere that you can hook this up.
It's really convenient that the hook is there and it also tucks really easily away behind the light when it's not being used.
Now I'm really not sure why the light is more bright when it's switched to 'On' than when it's switched to 'Auto'
because if you ever needed some light, surely it would be when the motion sensor is detecting motion.
For me, this was a bit disappointing. I don't really feel like the light is bright enough using the 'Auto' setting or even using the 'On' setting.
I'm actually not sure that this light provides enough illumination to be useful.
It's probably ok to light up the floor when you're walking along,
but you can't see much more than just a few centimetres in front of your face
because the light that it provides, is almost nothing.
The colour of this light is a nice, warm yellow glow. 2700K is the light colour, to be exact.
Now that number, 2700K, has nothing to do with the brightness of the light,
that's just the code that represents this particular colour on the light-colour spectrum.
That code, 2700K, has nothing to do with the brightness of the light.
All that tells you is the colour of the light which is represented on a scale.
And you can see here, 2700K, it is a warm, yellowy glow.
The brightness of a light on the other hand, is normally measured in lumens and just for comparison,
this is a Lifx mini bulb which runs at 800 lumens.
Now 800 lumens is pretty typical for a normal light bulb.
A typical, standard incandescent light bulb that is 60 watts will also produce around 800 lumens of light.
So I want you to keep that number in your head, 800 lumens from a normal light bulb.
Now let's compare that with how many lumens you get from this little device.
When the Xiaomi motion sensor is set to 'On', it produces 7 lumens.
When the light is switched to 'Auto', the maximum lumens produced by this light is 3.5.
So you can see what I mean when you compare those numbers to how much a normal light bulb produces.
It's a very small amount of light. It works best in a completely dark room where it can just start to illuminate some things.
I tried to use this in my garden shed where I don't have any power and I had it hooked over some tools to see what I was doing.
It didn't really provide enough light for me and I couldn't tell the difference between a shovel and a rake.
I tried using this light in the closet and I didn't find it was bright enough to even tell which clothes were which.
So the picture you are seeing may not been an accurate representation of what you will see in real life when using this light.
I'm really not sure this is enough light for most practical uses.
I just really wanted to share my personal experience of using this light.
Your experience might be something completely different and if you just want it to illuminate walkways, you might be fine.
I guess this is a night light, it's not designed to be particularly bright.
It could be really useful in a child's bedroom to leave on all night so they feel reassured.
Or if you hung this handle on your fridge, you probably would be able to see enough to know where the handle is.
It does provide some light. I guess it's better than no light at all.
I hope you got some value from today's video.
If you did, please consider hitting that subscribe button and check out some of my other videos over here.
See you next time!