Hello everyone thanks for tuning in again. I had a suggestion a long time ago
from Kevin who's one of our regular subscribers he actually said hey I'd
like to see you answer some of the you know the questions that you get from
your subscribers or comments on your channel go ahead answer them and you
know what lately I can see a lot of people getting ready for the holidays
they want a lot of their smart home equipment working so it's time to start
that series. I have a couple of questions obviously about smart home bulbs and
kind of getting those set up for the holidays and also just in general in
your home so let's get started with answering your smart home questions
volume one all right now the first question and I'm going to answer two
questions from this individual they're complex questions but I'm gonna take the
best shot I can at them Maxim maksimov that's his name he joined our channel a
little while ago here and he's been asking questions about the different
bulbs the different you know systems and what I would choose so let me read his
question directly here so his first question was should I buy a Philips Hue
hub or a Philips bridge hub is it better in 2018 without it or do I still need
the hue hub now there's a tricky piece to Philips Hue and this is the Philips
Hue box right here this is just an A19 bulb there's a little tricky piece to
Philips what they did with the ZigBee technology now if you don't know what
ZigBee is it's a protocol for a smart home or the Internet of Things whatever
you want to call it today the smart home devices sensors things like that and
it's a protocol that anyone can go and use and the other piece to that is
anyone can go and modify it so the difference or one of the differences
between z-wave and ZigBee is the fact that ZigBee is an open protocol that can
be modified so what Philips Hue did or what Philips did rather is they went out
and they modified the ZigBee protocol they still use it relatively in its
entirety but what they've done is they've created a bit of a purple
Dietary protocol here within ZigBee or in part parcel with the ZigBee protocol
so what it means to you ultimately is you will require the hub no matter what
you do if you want to use Philips Hue and their set of bulbs so for 2018 2019
2020 I think in general you're going to need that hub from Philips you're not
really going to be able to find a way around it at least as long as they want
that to be the case for you in your smart home the second part to his
question is much more complex it's basically which one of these
systems would you use so you know coming kind of right-to-left here for you left
to right this is Ikea trad free or trade free or whatever we want to say it's
some Swedish strange name Philips Hue, the Lifx bulbs are set of bulbs this is
Sengled Element they have a number of series as well
this is tp-link and this is you know I got sent this by a company here and it's
called Lohas or Lohas LED and it's just a standard Wi-Fi bulb and I think
we're seeing a lot of those makers come out and they're having integration
capability with a lot of systems so I wanted to actually bring that out and
talk a little bit about it and why I would purchase the different items here
on this on this table okay so to tackle this question I've kind of split out the
table here so over here and I just don't have a ye light bulb with me but the ye
light bulbs would sit here as well this side of the table is a Wi-Fi LED smart
bulb over here what we have are ZigBee protocol LED bulbs now the reason I've
kind of split those out is because I want to talk to you about this first and
foremost what does Wi-Fi do to you as a consumer over time now number one
obviously you got more network traffic as you add more
these your network traffic increases in terms of the communication going on just
on between your router or a wireless access point or you know if you have
extenders it doesn't matter these are going to increase traffic on that
networks and over time as you build up that traffic on the network just the
basics of networking say you don't want to do that it's kind of a runaway curve
in terms of broken packets or broken signals or broken communication once it
gets to a certain point of busyness everything starts breaking and nothing
will work so in general what I'm going to tell you is Wi-Fi is not something
you want to build your smart home on if you're only ever going to have 5 to 10
devices go for it these are perfect that's great but for me and the question
Maxim was asking what would I be using going forward so let's move over to this
side of the table so over on this side of the table we have three different
ZigBee protocol hubs as I said singled Element the Philips Hue and the IKEA
bulbs here and I'm gonna stop trying to say that name cuz it's just not working
for me now I'll tell you each one kind of has
their own little nuance here that you may love you may not love so let me just
go with those really quickly singled element standard ZigBee protocol can
connect with other ZigBee hubs like a Samsung smartthings hub so you know to
me this is the easiest to interface with other ZigBee hubs including an Amazon
echo Plus which has a ZigBee hub onboard so that's really nice this is a direct
interface instantaneously the Philips Hue the the quark there I kind of told
you about earlier it's a proprietary form of ZigBee it's been modified and
Philips wants to keep you within their system so you will need their hub now
their hub and their capabilities on the flipside are really high and I think all
of their products are very high quality I have yet to find a bulb I
don't love from Philips and you know so their quirk is really just that hub and
the requirement to have that hub in your home per 50 bulbs and that's a little
piece of ZigBee to understand it's kind of 50 you unit or bulb limit or device
limit there so Philips has that same 50 bulb limit that would be the same here
now the IKEA I'll show you I'll show you what that limitation is here it is right
there so you need this little controlling
device if you don't buy that you can't get these working there's all kinds of
you know hack videos that they'll show you where you can try and power reset
the hub and power reset the bulb and what-have-you but honestly it doesn't
work very well it's spotty at best and even when you do
it you still end up having to connect it to a ZigBee hub so what are you doing so
you know you can clearly see that I'm preferring in my home because these give
me the opportunity to have 50 devices connected on their hub on their system
all right so let's go through just the last kind of touch pieces here between
these three bulbs if you're building a smart home you know what are the real
benefits again these have proprietary hubs you're stuck within them the single
element can go out to Samsung smartthings can go to my EKKO plus they
don't have to use their own hub or their own application to manage them I like
that about them the thing that's maybe a little bit better you know for a product
like Philips you here is home kit integration, Google Home, integration
Amazon Echo integration or their voice assistant as well, so there's really no
platform that you can't use Philips on they can connect to Samsung SmartThings
as well so you still will need the hub don't don't get me wrong there but you
can use Samsung smartthings to trigger these on or off or change scenes or what
have you so you know ultimately the best integration with the rest of the smart
home community is here with Philips so in the end
what it comes down to for me is kind of what I was just talking about these are
great I love the the many hubs that I can connect to these are great because
they're probably going to be the cheapest in the end as long as you keep
that purchase in mind you can tell them a little annoying by that with IKEA but
you know in the end they're still going to be the cheapest we know IKEA is very
good at being an inexpensive producer and they do work there's nothing wrong
with those bulbs at all and they have a good suite of them and now they have a
smart home plug so this is still a good system as well but when I come back to
is I can usually buy the Philips Hue bulbs the standard bulbs on sale they're
not going to cost me a lot more than any of these other bulbs and in the end
they're so nice to turn on and off they're great dimming their colors are
fantastic and the suite of products continues to build out and build out and
build out so I can buy a light fixture in my bedroom or for my bedroom in my
kitchen in my living room I can buy all different different kinds of you know
strip lighting I could buy outdoor products with these guys and if I want I
can even have a mirror in my bathroom with Philips Hue integration or Philips
Hue bulbs within it so the capability of buying all these different light
fixtures and the ability to have up to 50 devices on that Philips Hue bridge
you can have multiple bridges I wouldn't put them next to each other but you can
have multiple bridges and it just gives you the opportunity to really build out
your smart home and again I can usually get the bulbs cheaper than there are
standard selling price so ultimately guys what it comes down to for me
Philips Hue so that was a long answer to a relatively short question but this is
why I couldn't just answer that in the comments and I felt like it was the
right time to come and start this series on answering your guys's questions so
you know what let's open it up what are your next questions you have more
questions about these bulbs that I need to answer next week would you like me to
go something else about home automation or
the smart home in general and give you some more details about any of this
leave those comments down below leave the questions down below and of course
join our channel so you can see your questions answered as I can get to them
so thanks for watching everyone and we'll see you next time