Eufy is a division of the very popular smartphone accessories company, Anker, and it produces the majority of its smart home products as well as some fitness products like smart scales and such. Eufy recently launched its Lumos smart light bulbs, which are actually some of the cheapest smart lights on the market right now. Which leads many people to wonder whether they are worth their price or not. Well let’s find out.
Eufy offers two light bulbs – at the time of writing this – which is a white bulb and then a tunable white bulb. The tunable white bulb allows you to choose from different shades of white. Whether you want more of a yellowish tint or a daylight white color, you can do all that with this bulb. As far as brightness is concerned, it can get up to 800 lumens, which is right on par with bulbs from LIFX and Philips Hue. It is remote controlled via the Eufy Home app on the Google Play Store (also the Apple App Store for those with iOS devices), and it does have support for Alexa with a planned update to Google Assistant in the near future. And finally, there is no hub required for this bulb, which is a theme that is becoming more and more popular these days with newer smart light bulbs.
Now that we’ve gotten the boring features and spec rundown out of the way, let’s talk about setting up and actually using the bulb. Set up is actually the easiest I’ve seen with a smart bulb. With some other bulbs, you may have trouble finding it on your network, or getting it connected to your WiFi network. But with the Eufy Lumos bulbs, it’s super easy. Just put the bulb into a lamp, turn it on and it’ll blink three times. After that, the app will find the bulb almost instantly. From there you can go through connecting it to your WiFi network, giving it a name and a position in your home. This is useful if you are using multiple light bulbs in a room or in your home.
Pretty much everything else is inside the app, for this bulb. Within the Eufy Home app, you can go ahead and add this bulb to a group of bulbs. For instance, if you have a lamp that uses multiple bulbs, you can group them together, or group lights in a room together as well. You can adjust the temperature of the light bulb within the app, the brightness and set up a schedule as well. The bulb can handle up to 10 schedules at a time. The schedule that I set is for 6PM during the week, so it’ll turn on once the sun starts to go down (and thus it starts to get darker in my office). But you can set this to do many different things. Within the schedule interface, you can also set it to turn off or just turn it on. And if you set it to turn on, you can then adjust the temperature of the bulb. Now, if you are going to be away, you can set a schedule for that. For instance, if you are going to be out of town for a week on vacation, and you want it to look like there is someone home, you can use this schedule. The way it works, is you set a start time and an end time, and then you can choose to repeat on certain days. The bulb will then randomly turn and off during that time. To simulate someone being home.
Of course, the feature that everyone is likely excited about, is Alexa integration. This is also pretty easy to get setup. Just open the Alexa app and search for the EufyHome skill. Once you have enabled the skill, you’ll need to link your Eufy account. From there, Alexa will be able to discover EufyHome lights nearby (and other products, like its RoboVac 11c) to add to its list of smart home products. After that is done, you’ll be able to say things like “Alexa, turn off the desk lamp” or use whatever name you made for the bulb. Since it’s in the lamp on my desk, that’s what I decided to name it. You can also tell Alexa to “set the desk lamp to 20%” or tell it to make the light warmer and a few other commands. Otherwise, it works really great, and it really cannot be any simpler to get setup and use.
Those that aren’t using Alexa yet, but have an Android device, are probably wondering about Google Assistant. Eufy told me that it is in their roadmap to add Google Assistant support to the Lumos bulbs. However the exact date for it is yet to be determined. It should hopefully be soon, especially since Anker is launching its own Google Assistant speaker in the Zolo Mojo, which is said to be launching before the end of the year.
With a regular price of $25.99, the Eufy Lumos smart light bulbs are an absolute steal, and Eufy has made them super easy to setup and use, even with Alexa. Which is actually a pretty big deal. With LIFX’s bulbs, which are around $60, you sometimes run into the issues of it not being able to connect to WiFi, or connect the bulb to WiFi, or some other issues. Nothing like that with the Eufy Lumos bulb here. Which is really nice to have. The only issue with this bulb, and it’s not really an issue, but it’s the fact that it doesn’t do color. So you are stuck with white only for now. Eufy will probably launch a color bulb in the near future, as it is expected to launch a number of smart home products in the coming months. So those that want to add some color to their home or setup, Eufy Lumos isn’t the answer, but those that just want some smart bulbs, it most definitely is the answer.
Buy the Eufy Lumos Smart Light Bulb
