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The Best Smart Bulbs in 2023

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What’s up Smart Homers, my name’s Aaron. In this article I’m going to show you 14 different smart bulbs and tell you which ones are my favorites and which are my least favorites!

 I’d guess that most people start off on their smart home journey with smart lighting, and specifically smart bulbs. Smart bulbs are great because they don’t require any installation skill, and can be quickly and easily added to your smart home. A lot of times people start with cheap, cloud-based bulbs, but eventually they want to buy higher quality bulbs. The problem is, there are tons of smart bulbs out there, and it can be difficult to figure out which one you should purchase. That’s why I bought 14 different smart bulbs, and I’ve tested each to see how they work.

I’ll compare their prices and features, briefly showing snapshots of their native apps, but my main testing will be with my smart home platform of choice, Home Assistant. If you don’t use Home Assistant, that’s ok, I’ll still give you an idea of which other smart home systems they are compatible with.

Bulb Specifications

Bulb Model Protocol Lumens Eq Wattage Wattage CRI White Range Price Power On State Home Assistant SmartThings Hubitat Google Assistant Amazon Alexa Apple Home
ATHOM LB01-15W-WLED-1 WiFi 1400 ? 15W – 3000-6000K $ Yes local ish no no yes no
SwitchBot W101400 WiFi/BT 800 60W 10W ‎80 2700-6500K $$ Yes Local via BT yes yes yes yes yes
Inovelli LZW42-N Z-Wave 806 60W 9.5W – 2700 – 6500k $$$ Yes local yes yes no no no
Wyze WLPA19C WiFi 1100 75W 12W 90+ 1800-6500k $ Yes cloud, cust int yes no yes yes no
YEELIGHT YLDP15YL WiFi 800 60W 8.5W 80+ 1700K-6500K $$ Yes local yes yes yes yes yes
WiZ 603449 WiFi 800 60W 8.8W 90 2200 – 6500K $ yes local yes yes yes yes no
Hue 563254 Zigbee 1100 75W 10.5 – 2000 – 6500K $$$$ Yes local yes yes-ish hue hub required hue hub required hue hub required
meross MSL120D WiFI 810 60W 9W – 2700-6500K $ No Cloud cust int. yes no yes yes not this model
Nanoleaf NL45-0800WT120E26 WiFi, Thread, BT 806 60W 9W – 2700 – 6500K $$ Yes Local, bt yes yes     yes, thread
Nanoleaf Matter NL67E100 Matter, Thread, BT 806 60W 9W – 2700 – 6500K $$ Yes local, matter yes   yes   yes
LIFX LHLA19E26US WiFi 1100 75W 11.5W 80 1500-9000K $$$$ No local yes yes yes yes yes
Sengled ‎E11-N1EAWA Zigbee 800 60W 9W 80 2700 – 6500K $$ Yes local yes yes yes, w/ hub yes, zb radio no
Kasa KL135P2 WiFi 1000 60W 10.5W 88+ 2500K-6500K $ Yes local yes yes yes yes no
innr AE 280C-2 Zigbee ‎806 60W 9.5W 90+ 1800K – 6500K $$$ Yes local yes yes no yes, zb radio no
TRÅDFRI 604.391.68 Zigbee 800 60W 8.9W 90+ 1780 – 4000K $$ Yes local yes yes yes with ikea hub yes with ikea hub yes with ikea hub

Requirements

When choosing which bulbs to test, I set a maximum price of $40, as anything more than that is ridiculous in my opinion. Also, I tried to avoid bulbs that rely on cloud connectivity, because those bulbs can stop working if the company hosting the cloud goes bust. Finally, while many of the bulbs will work on WiFi, some use Z-Wave, Zigbee, or Thread, which are other wireless protocols. These require a special hub or radio set up to get them working. If you’re not sure what these protocols are and you’re not using Home Assistant, you might want to look for a different bulb.

Ok, first let’s look at the WiFi devices.

SwitchBot

The first one is the SwitchBot Bulb. SwitchBot sent me this bulb for a YouTube video, and once I saw the amazing colors this thing produces, I knew I had to do a bulb comparison. When you open it up, you can see there’s nothing special looking about it – it does have the Switchbot logo on the base, but nothing that stands out and looks bad.

As soon as you install it and apply power, you’ll see it light up white. To control it with your smartphone, you’ll have to download the Switchbot App. Before I could use it in the app, I had to download a new firmware version for the bulb, but once I did there were no issues. The app has pretty basic controls, with White, Color, Dynamic, and Music modes. I’m not gonna get into all the details of the app, but I do like that it lets you set some presets  in the White mode, so you can tune the bulb to match your existing lights and then save that preset. There are also presets for color mode as well as a bunch of options for “basic colors”, which is sometimes nicer than using a color wheel. Dynamic mode has some options for looping colors, but it’s nothing earth-shattering. Where this bulb shines in my opinion is compatibility – it’s compatible with Home Assistant, SmartThings, Hubitat, Google Assisant, Amazon Assistant, AND Apple Home. This means that if you decide to switch platforms later on, these bulbs will still work for you. The brightness of this bulb is kind of mid range for all the ones I’m testing, so it’s nothing to worry about.

Home Assistant

In order to add this bulb to Home Assistant, we actually won’t be using WiFi. Instead we’ll be using Bluetooth. This requires you to have Bluetooth set up on your device running Home Assistant, but that’s as simple as adding a Bluetooth dongle. Once you do that, the bulb is gonna automatically show up in Home Assistant. You’ll see it in the Devices and Services page, and you can click the “Configure” button. Choose an area for it and then you’ll see it show up under the SwitchBot integration. You only get the single light entity, but you can control it just as you’d expect. You do want to make sure  you have a decent Bluetooth range for these, so if you haven’t it might be work checking out Bluetooth proxy using ESPHome.

Overall

Overall I’d say this bulb is decent. If you can get it on a sale it would be worth picking up a couple. SwitchBot has lots of unique products, so it’s not a bad ecosystem to get into.

Wyze

The next one I want to look at is the Wyze Color Bulb. If you haven’t heard of Wyze, they’re most well known for their affordable cameras, but they’ve branched out into other areas of the smart home world, including smart lighting and robotic vacuums. Right off I’ll say that this bulb is super bright. It’s actually the brightest, and you’re getting all of the 1100 lumens they advertise. It has a generic look like the SwitchBot, but it does have a bit more bold of a logo on the base than SwitchBot. It’s pretty hefty, which makes you feel like you’re holding something high quality.

Once you connect it to power it’ll start pulsing letting you know it’s ready to connect. I already have the Wyze app since I have a bunch of their cameras, but if you don’t you’ll need it. As you’d expect, the app gives you a brightness slider, color wheel, and a white temperature wheel. It also has a bunch of preset Scenes that you can choose from, or you can save your own if they don’t match what you want. In the settings, there’s a Power Loss Recovery option, which allows you to tell the bulb what to do if there’s a power outage. When the power comes back on, the bulb can either turn on, or maintain the state that it was in before the outage.

As far as compatibility, this bulb is gonna work via WiFi with Home Assitant, SmartThings, Google Assistant, and Amazon Assistant. As far as i know, it does work with Hubitat or Apple Home.

Home Assistant

Adding this bulb to Home Assistant isn’t as easy as the SwitchBot, but it will be connected with WiFi rather than Bluetooth. For this one we’ll need a custom integration from the Home Assistnat Community Store, so you’ll need to install that if you don’t have it. Once installed, search for the Wyze integration in HACS and install it. Then restart Home Assistant, and then head to the Devices and Services page int he Settings menu. In the bottom right corner, tap “Add Integration”, and search for Wyze. You’ll need to enter your username and password for your Wyze account, and then click Submit. A window will show all of your Wyze devices that are supported by the integration – and as you can see, one of them is the bulb. Choose an area for your bulb if you want and click finish. Then, scroll down to the integration in the Devices and Services page and click Devices. You’ll see the bulb in the list, and you can click it to open the device page. Here you have a basic light entity with color controls, white temperature, and also some effects.

Unfortunately this integration does rely on the Wyze cloud, which a lot of people who use Home Assignat aren’t a fan of. However, if you go to the integrations page and click configure on the Wyze integration, you can check the “Use local control for light bulbs and light strips” option, and apparently you won’t need the cloud connection for this bulb! That’s kind of cool!

Overall

Overall, I really love how bright this bulb is, and the colors are pretty decent too. It definitely feels high quality, and it’s competitively priced for such a bright bulb. The one thing I’d like to see is a local API for all Wyze devices, and a native Home Assistant integration.

Yeelight

Ok, so the next WiFi bulb I wanna look at is one that I’ve been itching to review for a long time, and that’s the Yeelight Smart LED Bulb 1S. It’s an 800 lumen bulb with one of the most unique designs I’ve ever seen.  It has a tapered cylindrical shape, with a diamond-patterned design on the body and the Yeelight logo on it. The screw has purple accent plastic which is a nice touch. On the back side of the bulb it has the HomeKit pairing code for adding it to Apple Home.

To get started with this bulb, you’ll need to download the Yeelight app. When you first add the bulb, it tells you about LAN control, which means that if your phone is on the same network as the bulb, the communication doesn’t involve the Yeelight cloud – pretty cool! This LAN control applies to Google Home as well!

The app have four tabs – Recommend, White, Color, and Flow. The Recommend tab has some built-in presets. The color tab shows a color pad rather than a wheel, but serves the function that you’d expect. The white tab allows you to tune the white temperature, and the flow tab allows you to customize the “Flow” effect.

Home Assistant

A year or so ago I was looking into these bulbs, but their integration with Home Assistant wasn’t working because of an issue with Yeelight. When I started prepping for this comparison, I saw that the issue had been fixed and the integration for Home Assistant was in working order, so I decided to give them a shot. The integration is native, meaning that they’re super easy to add.

If you go to Settings, Devices and Services, you’ll see that the bulb is automatically discovered by Home Assistant, and you can click the configure button to set it up. Assign it a location if you want, and then you can find the integration on the Devices and Services page and and click Devices. If you click the color bulb, you’ll see that you get a basic light entity, with color and white temperature controls as well as a whole list of custom effects. If you look up the Yeelight integration, you’ll see that it’s IoT class is local push, meaning that there is no cloud involvement – awesome!

Overall

As far as design goes, I think this is one of the best looking of all the bulbs in this article, but what I wasn’t impressed with was the yellow color accuracy. I’ll show some of the results of my testing later on, but the “yellow” ends up being more of a pale yellowish white. As far as compatibility goes though, this thing works with all the major players – Home Assistant, SmartThings, Hubitat, Google Assistant, Amazon Assisant, and Apple Home.

Athom

The next one we’re gonna look at is a bit different, and that’s because it runs a software that you don’t see typically used for smart bulbs. This bulb by Athom runs WLED, which is a firmware that’s made for controlling LED strips. Athom is a company that sells a bunch of smart home products that are flashed with open source firmwares like WLED and Tasmota.

If you haven’t seen my WLED for beginners vidoes, they’re worth checking out if you want to get into LED strip lighting. In that video I use an Athom WLED controller, which is super easy for beginners.

The first thing you notice about this bulb is how big it is! It has an E26 base, but the body of this thing is a lot larger than an A19. They do offer a lower wattage bulb that is a bit smaller if that’s a problem. You can also see that it’s rated for 15W, which is a higher power rating than any of the other bulbs we’re looking at.

Setup in the app works like any WLED controller. Athom has a disclaimer that if you turn up the brightness of the colored LEDs as well as the white LED, you could damage the bulb. I actually tried it, but it didn’t seem to cause any problems, but leaving the bulb like that for a long time could damage it I suppose. You really ony want to operate the color channel or the white channel, not both at the same time.

There are a lot of other things you can do in the app regarding effects and stuff, but they’re mostly geared toward LED strips.

One thing you might want to do is to rename the bulb. To do this, tap the config button, then tap User Interface, and then change the “Server description” to something that makes sense. Tap save when you’re done.

Home Assistant

Adding this bulb to Home Assistnat is super easy since Home Assistant has a native WLED integration. While , when I first tried to add it, it didn’t show in Home Assistant, so I tried to add it manually using the bulb’s IP address. This gave me an error, stating that the WLED device uses CCT channels, and so was not supported by the integration. However, creators of WLED issued a fix in the WLED software that I want to show you. Either in the app or on your PC, open the controls for the bulb and click Configuration. Choose LED Preferences, and then scroll down until you see the “White Management” section. Check the “Calculate CCT Channel from RGB” option, and then click Save. If you restart Home Assistant, now you’ll see that the Bulb is auto-discovered, and you can go ahead and configure it! Click configure, click Submit, give the device an area if you want, and then click Finish. Now you’ll see your bulb in the WLED integration, so click it, and then click the device. On the device page you can see that it has a light entity, which has color and white controls, a bunch of configuration controls that you can mess with, and even a diagnostics with some information about the device.  Note it shows LED count because this software is really meant for LED strips.

One other thing that’s cool is that you can navigate to the WLED controls right from the device info section by clicking the Visit link.

Overall

This bulb is pretty cool, but one of the issues I have with it is related to compatibility. It does have local network compatibility with Home Assistant, but only works properly with Amazon Assistant. There is an Edge driver for SmartThings, but it seems flaky as the SmartThings device can become out of sync with the device itself. This limited compatibility may not be what you’re looking for, but if you’re using Home Assistant it’ll be just fine.

WiZ

The next one is the WiZ Connected color bulb. It’s one of the cheapest options, and looking at it, the bulb looks very basic apart from the blue ring around the base of the screw. As far as compatibility goes, WiZ bulbs have a native local integration with Home Assistant, and can also be connected to SmartThings, Hubitat, Google Assistant, and Amazon Assistant.

To get this thing set up, download the WiZ app. There are actually two apps, so I’ll show you both of them so you can see a little bit of the differences. To put the bulb into pairing mode you just have to turn it off and on three times quickly. It begins pulsing cool white, and you can add it in the app. The interface for the app is a bit weird to be honest, but it has sliders for light warmth and brightness, and if you tap the Mode button you can se a bunch of presets. If you select Custom Colors, you can then select a color from the color rectangle and tap add. They have other effects like this Pastel Colors preset, and there the slider bar for white warmth turns into an Effect Speed slider. One cool thing to note in the settings is that there is an Allow Local Communication toggle, which is cool, because it means that this bulb isn’t reliant on the WiZ cloud. In the Settings menu you’ll also see a notification that there’s a new app available, and it gives you the option to migrate to the new one. The new app looks a lot better, with a color wheel rather than the weird way of setting colors in the previous one. I won’t go into any more detail with it, but V2 is definitely better.

Home Assistant

Adding this thing to Home Assistant is a piece of cake because there’s a native integration for it. Home Assistant recongizes your WiZ device automatically and if you restart Home Assistant, and then go to devices and services from the settings menu, you’ll see it show up there. I didn’t feel like restarting Home Assistant, so I just clicked Add Integration from the bottom right, searched for “wiz”, clicked the WiZ integration,  and then clicked Submit. The device was discovered, and then I clicked finish after setting the area for it.

On the device page you can see that you have a light entity, a sensor for power consumption, and an effect speed slider. I’m not sure if the Power sensor is accurate, but it’s really not necessary for a bulb in my opinion. The light entity gives you options for various effects, a color wheel, and white warmth controls.

One thing to note with the WiZ integration is that it’s IoT class is Local Push, the best type of IoT class, since it doesn’t rely on cloud services and it doesn’t waste resources by polling.

Overall

Overall it’s a decent bulb, with impressive color accuracy when it comes to Red, Green, and Blue. The Yellow was very orangy, which is too bad, but otherwise the colors were great. As far as color brightness, generally it had a fairly average color brightness, with a suprisingly bright blue for it’s power rating.

Meross

The next one wins the comparison for the cheapest of all the bulbs in this article – but let’s check out its features. This one is the Meross smart bulb. The first thing you notice about this bulb is how light it is! It literally feels like there’s nothing to it, but maybe that’s a good thing. It’s another very basic bulb with not much to it aesthetically.

Download the Meross app, and then screw the bulb in and apply power. The bulb will flash between cool and warm white, and in the app you can tap the Plus icon in the corner and follow the steps to add it. I have to say that I really like the look of this app – they did something right with it, and it’s really easy on the eyes. In the device page  you can see Color and White tabs, and each have a wheel for the color selection and warmth selection respectively. There’s a brightness slider under the wheel, and a power button at the bottom of the page. Unfortunately with this bulb, if you had a power outage, when the power comes back on, so does the bulb.

This bulb works with Home Assistant, SmartThings, Google Assistant, and Amazon Assistant. Meross is known for making Apple Home compatible products, and they do have a different model that works with Apple Home if that’s the platform you use.

Home Assistant

To add this bulb to Home Assistant, we’re gonna need a custom integration, of which there are a few in the Home Assistant Community store. The one I would recommend is called Meross LAN as it’s the simplest to set up and it allows you to communicate with your Meross devices locally. Search for it in HACS, click Download, click Download again and wait for it to install. After it installs, go ahead and restart Home Assistant. Head back to the devices and services page and then click Add Integration, and then search for Meross. Click Meross LAN, and then click the discovered instance of Meross LAN. Since you don’t know the device key, you can hit Submit, and it will give you an error but tell you it can retreive the device key from the cloud. Click that option and then enter your Meross Account info from the app. This will be the only time it needs cloud access – when you add new devices. The device page shows a light entity with a color wheel and color warmth controls, and also a signal strength entity, but that’s pretty much it! Nice and simple.

Overall

Like I said before, this bulb is the cheapest of them all, and I’d say it’s not bad for the price. The color accuracy was great for the red and blue colors, but the green way an extremely blue-ish green, not the vibrant green that you see in some of the others. The yellow was also a bit orangy, but where those colors lacked in accuracy, they excelled in brightness, making this bulb take first place for overall brightness, despite its 810 lumen rating.

LiFX

The next one is a bulb that has really grown on me, and that’s the LiFX Color bulb. It’s the most premium-feeling bulb of all the ones we’re looking at today,  and right up near the top for brightness. It has a made-to-be-seen design – a bulb that you don’t want to put a shade over. It feels like the diffuser could unscrew from the base but it doesn’t, and although that diffuser looks pretty small, this bulb has a 210 degree angle of lighting. The base of the bulb is blank except for the LiFX logo, and some information squished down near the screw. The instruction manual has a sticker with the Apple Home pairing code on it, so you should save that if you want to add the bulb to Apple Home. Along with Apple Home, this bulb works with Home Assistant locally, and it works with SmartThings, Hubitat, Google Assistant and Amazon Assistant. It’s super compatible!

Adding it to the app proved a little more difficult than I thought, but I believe the issue was because the bulb requires a 2.4 Ghz network, and eventually I did get it connected and had no further issues. The app has an interesting design, and while I don’t like UI when it comes to creating rooms and groups, the controls for the bulb itself are pretty satisfying. You have the color wheel with  a brightness scroller in the middle and the power button at the bottom. Below that you have tabs for white control, themes, and palette, but in general the rest of the app is pretty standard. One thing is that there’s no option to control the power on stat of the bulb, so if you lose power, when power is restored the bulb comes on, even if it was off before.

Home Assistant

Since LiFX has a built-in Home Assistant integration, once you’ve set up the bulb in the app, it should be auto-discovered by Home Assistant. If you head to the devices and services page, you’ll see it is auto-discovered, so you can go ahead and click configure. Click submit, choose an area for your devices if you want, and then click finish. On the Device Page, you can see a light entity, an identify button, and a restart button. The light entity has a color wheel and white warmth control as well as some effects that can be applied. The Identify button makes the bulb flash so you can identify it if you have more than one. The restart button restarts the bulb if you have some need for that.

Overall

Overall this bulb really feels like a premium device, but its good to remember that it’s the single most expensive of all the bulbs in this article, followed by the Philips Hue bulb. Color wise, the accuracy was pretty decent, with the yellow being a little bit orangy, but making up for that with decent brightness overall.

TP-Link Kasa

The next one also has an interesting design, and it’s then 1000 lumen TP-Link Kasa bulb. I’ve never really explored Kasa’s smart home products before, but I’ve been wanting to since I made my smart plug comparison video/article. They make some great stuff that works locally with Home Assistant. The base of the bulb has a unique layered design, with a smooth top layer and rippled waves underneath. There’s a cutaway of the first layer almost all the way down to the screw, and below that is the Kasa logo. The diffuser has a flattened-sphere shape, and it looks like it can be separated from the base, but cant. I think they did a good job of making the bulb look unique, but not cheap. Speaking of price, these are one of the cheapest bulbs in this comparison, which I think is pretty sweet.

Adding this bulb to the app was extremely easy – just note the model number from the side of the bulb if you’re installing this in a hard-to-reach place. You may need to perform a software update on the device, but that should be it. Tap the device to go to the device page. On the top you’ll see four shortcut buttons, which are presets that you can set up. On the bottom of the device page you can see four tabs: Power Brightness, White, and Color. Brightness gives you a brightness wheel, White gives you a warmth circle, and Color gives you a color wheel as you’d expect. If you tap the Presets button in the bottom left corner, you can change the persistent presets, and there’s also a “Recents” tab. You can create a schedule for the light, and you can also track the Energy usage of the bulb, which is pretty cool.

As far as compatibility, this bulb works locally with Home Assistant, and it also works with SmartThings, Hubitat, Google Assistant, and Amazon Assistant.

Home Assistant

Home Assistant has a really nice integration for Kasa devices, and if you look at the page for it in the Home Assistant documentation, you can see that it’s IoT class is Local Polling, and not only that, but it scores a platinum on their quality scale.

Your bulb should be auto-discovered, but if it isn’t for some reason, just click Add Integration, search for the Kasa integration, click TP Link, and then click TP-Link Kasa Smart. Click the Submit button and it should find your bulb, and then you can click Submit again. Give the bulb an area if you want and then click Finish.

On the device page you’ll see a light entity and some power consumption entities. The light entity gives you a color wheel and white warmth ajustments as expected, and I haven’t checked the power consumption entities to see how accurate they are.

Overall

I really like how cheap these bulbs are for ones that work locally with Home Assisatnt without any struggle. The color accuracy was decent, with brightness just under that of the LiFX bulb. 

Ok, next we’ll look at the bulbs that use other protocols like zigbee or z-wave rather than WiFi.

Philips Hue

The first one is a legendary zigbee bulb that’s been the standard for a long time  – the Philips Hue bulb. There are a few different options, but I got the 1100 lumen, “medium lumen”, bulb. It has a non-standard design, but  it’s not super flashy, so you don’t feel like you’re paying for looks like you are with the LiFX. Speaking of price though, this is the most expensive bulb in this article!

It has the iconic Hue look – the weird trumpet shape that I honestly don’t particularly like, but that’s ok. It has the Philips Hue logo on the base in a copper color with some model information, and a plain screw end.

This bulb is different from the ones we’ve looked at previously because it typically requires you to connect it to the Philips Hue Hub. Then you could use the Philips Hue app to control it, and everything’s just peachy except that you’re wasting your money. Since other hubs like SmartThigns and Home Assistant can connect directly to the bulb, there’s no need to buy the Hue hub. However, Philips would rather you did, and I’ll explain that a little later. Anyway, it’s compatible with Home Assistant, SmartThings, and Hubitat (with or without the hub), and its compatible with Google Assistant, Amazon Assistant, and Apple Home only if you get the hub.

Home Assistant

Since I use Home Assistant, I’ll show you how it looks there. Put ZHA into pairing mode, and then to put the bulb into pairing mode, you just have to screw it in and apply power. It starts out white, turns green, and then white again. ZHA should pick up the bulb pretty quickly, and you rename it and assign it to an area if you’d like. In Home Assistant it shows up with a light entity, as well as some configuration options. It allows you to set the state after power on which is really nice, as well as what color and brightness you like to have it start up with. The light entity gives you the standard color wheel and white warmth controls, and a single color loop effect.

Overall

Not gonna lie, I was more impressed than I thought I’d be with this bulb, but I’m still not sure that it’s worthy of the hype. Probably the best part of it was the color accuracy which was extremely accurate for red green and blue, but which looked horrendous for yellow.

Here’s the part I hated – if you ever delete one of these bulbs from your hub (other than Hue), you can’t put it back into pairing mode without the use of another Hue product! Factory resetting does nothing, and after researching about it I read that you have to use a Hue Dimmer to reset the bulb so that it can be paired. This problem bit me when I was testing it with other hubs, but I was super happy when I found out that you can use Zigbee2MQTT, an add-on I run alongside Home Assistant, to put it in pairing mode with a feature called Touchlink. Other than that, I’m not sure of any other way to put it into pairing mode, which is crazy.

Sengled

The next Zigbee bulb we’re gonna look at is the Sengled bulb. You may remember Sengled from my previous comparison videos/articles where we looked at their contact sensor and smart plug. Now we come to the bulb, which at first glance appears fairly ordinary. I do like the little bit of flair they put into the bottom edge of the base. Other than that, it just has the Sengled logo on the base and some Zigbee information. Similarly to Philips, Sengled does sell a hub that makes this bulb compatible with Google Assistant or Amazon Assistant, but by itself it’s compatible with Home Assistant, SmartThings, Hubitat, and Amazon Echos that have a Zigbee hub built in. Once again, I’m gonna skip using the Sengled hub since I think one hub should be all you need.

Home Assistant

Adding this device to Home Assistant is pretty easy – just put ZHA into pairing mode, and then screw the bulb in and apply power. The bulb is gonna flash blue, green, red and then white. It should be picked up pretty quickly by ZHA and initialized. You can give it a name and assign it to an area if you want. In the device page you get a light entity with color and warmth controls, and also some configuration entities. There’s On Level, Start-Up color temperature and Start-Up current level entities. I assume these have to do with power on state, but I couldn’t any of them to do anything except color temperature.

Overall

Overall this bulb is okay, but the color accuracy wasn’t too great. Red and blue were spot on, but green had quite the blueish tint to it, and yellow was just horrible. However, unlike the Hue bulb, this one allows you to reset it but turning it off and on ten times fast.

innr

Another zigbee bulb that I tested out was the innr color. Out of the box comes a fairly generic looking bulb. It has the innr logo on the base, as well as some zigbee information. Innr doesn’t sell their own hub, so you’re definitely gonna need one that’s compatible if you want to use this bulb. It’s gonna work with Home Assistant, SmartThings, Hubitat, and an Amazon Echo that has a built in Zigbee radio. This bulb also allows you to reset it but turning it off and on six times fast, unlike the Hue bulb.

Home Assistant

To add it to Home Assistant, put ZHA in pairing mode and then screw in the bulb and apply power. It should get picked up right away, and you can give it a name and area.

In the device info page you’ll see that you get your standard light entity as usual, but you also get a decent number of configuration options, including On level, On/off transition time, start up behavior (after power loss), the start up color temp and the start up brightness. I couldn’t figure out what On level does, but I can confirm that the rest of them work as you’d expect. The Start-up behavior setting even allows you to tell the bulb to go to whatever state it was in when power was lost. Very cool!

Overall

One thing I really like about Zigbee bulbs, and this one in particular, is that there are some configuration options that you can change without the need for the manufacturers app. I’m not sure how many of these options are available in other platforms like SmartThings, but in Home Assistant there is a lot you can do. Color accuracy was excellent for red, green, and blue, and even the yellow was pretty accurate. Brightness was about average.

IKEA Tradfri

This one is the last of the Zigbee bulbs, and I almost didn’t include it. In almost all of my previous comparison vides/articles, people have asked why I didn’t include Ikea products, and I haven’t for the most part because they didn’t deliver to my area. Now they do, so here we are. The IKEA Tradfri bulb is probably the cheapest feeling and most generic looking bulb of all the ones in this article. Notably smaller than the other bulbs, it still packs 800 lumens and holds its own in terms of brightness. It works with both Home Assistant, SmartThings, and Hubitat, and if you use it with their Tradfri hub, it will also work with Google Assistant, Amazon Assistant, and Apple Home.

Home Assistant

To add it to Home Assistant, put ZHA in pairing mode and then screw in the bulb and apply power. It should get picked up right away, and you can give it a name and area.

In the device page you’ll see the light entity, an On Level entity, and then start up entities for state, color temperature, and brightness. Again, I’m not sure what the “On Level” entity does, but the startup entities work great.

Overall

My biggest issue with this bulb was that I’m pretty sure I got a defective one. For some reason the green does not work – at least I can’t get pure green. The closest to green I can get is a greenish-yellow, which is really weird. The color accuracy was decent for red and blue, with what I’d say was a decent yellow, but the green was way off. Unfortunately it’s hard to recommend a bulb when you get a defective one, but anyway, on to the next.

Inovelli

This next one is the only Z-Wave bulb we’re going to look at, and it’s made by a company called Inovelli. We’ve seen great things from this company, and although they’ve have some hard times, their partnership with Linus Tech Tips on a presence sensing switch is promising. If there’s one thing I love about the company, it’s their packaging – its fire.

Anyway, the bulb is an 800 lumen bulb with a nice, hefty feel to it. It has the Inovelli logo in large grey letters on the base, and a bit of a wavy edge down by the screw. Otherwise it looks pretty basic. Since this is a Z-Wave bulb, there’s no native app, but it will work with Home Asisstant, SmartThigns, and Hubitat.

Home Assistant

To put the bulb into pairing mode, just screw it in and it should go into pairing mode.

In the device page in Home Assisatnt you get a light entity with the expected controls, a Firmware entity, and a ping entity. The firmware entity lets you know if the bulb is up to date, and I believe any updates can be done directly through Home Assistant, which is really nice.

Overall

One thing about this bulb that I like is that it acts as a Z-Wave repeater, meaning that it strengthens your Z-Wave mesh. However, you may not see as good range as with newer Z-Wave devices because this one is only rocking a 500 series chip, although the latest is 800 I believe. I didn’t have any issues, but I do have a robust network with many Z-Wave light switches. The color accuracy was pretty decent for this bulb, with very accurate red and green, decently accurate blue, and a superb yellow color.

Nanoleaf

The next two bulbs I’m looking at are really a class of their own – one runs on Thread, and the other on Matter.

Nanoleaf has been a front-runner in the higher-end lighting arena, specifically with their edge-lit LED panels, but they also make standard RGB bulbs. Their main line of “Essentials” bulbs were what I’m showing first, a Thread-based bulb that was meant to be used with their Nanoleaf hub. Since they are Thread bulbs, the also work directly with Apple Home if you have one of their Home Pods which act as a Thread border router.

They are definitely one of the cooler looking bulbs, with their distinctive crystal diffuser design, squarish base, and touch of green accent on the screw. The base of the bulb also has the HomeKit pairing code, so you can add it to Apple Home pretty easily.

In the app the bulb is added via Bluetooth, and then it will  automatically search for and add the bulb to a Thread network. The app is pretty basic, with a power toggle and brightness slider at the top, and then 3 tabs, Basic, Scene, and Favorites. The basic screen has the color wheel and some presets below it, the scene tab has a bunch of preset scenes, and also allows you to created your own, and you can mark some of those scenes as favorites and they’ll show up on the Favorites tab.

Home Assistant

There is a Nanoleaf integration, but that only works for a few supported devices that use WiFi. Since Thread isn’t fully working with Home Assistant, we can’t add one of these bulbs directly to Home Assistant with that protocol either, but we can add it via Bluetooth using the HomeKit Controller integration.

Once added we should see a light entity, a thread provisioning button, an identify button, and some other thread entities. I’m not really sure what any of these do, but all you need is the light. Don’t forget that your Bluetooth range might be low, but it can be increased with Bluetooth proxies.

Anyway, thanks for sticking around to the end! Now let’s go over which ones I think are the best.

The Matter Version

Nanoleaf has just realeased a new version of this same bulb, which, from what I can tell, has the exact same LED in it, but this one is controlled by Matter over thread. They actually sent me this one to take a look at, so I figured I’d put it in this article if I could get it working with Home Assistant. Well, wouldn’t you know, I was able to add it to Home Assistant with a bit of trouble, but understand that the Matter integration for Home Assistant is in Beta. I was also able to add it to SmartThings as well.

Overall

This bulb really does have a great look and feel to it – it seems like they put a lot of work into the design, but the brightness is where this bulb really suffers. This was by far the dimest bulb of all of them, the next brightest being the Philips hue. Red, Green, and Blue were decently accurate, with a moderately accurate yellow. If you have to pick between the two, I’d pick the Matter version since it’s replacing the original.

Testing

For each of these bulbs we’ve looked at, I set them to Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow at maximum brightness. I used a lux meter I picked up on Amazon to measure the brightness of the bulbs at each color. You can see the results below, and even though the actual values may not mean much, it’s a decent way to compare the relative brightness of the bulbs.

I also recorded this process with my camera and used a feature in Davinci Resolve to give an idea of the accuracy of each color. The feature is called Hue vs. Hue, and it shows you a spectrum of color, with peaks to show what colors are displayed on the camera. The location of the peak gives an idea of the “accuracy” of the color. You can see below that the Inovelli’s blue isn’t exactly “true blue”, the actual blue color is a tiny bit toward green. This difference is really insignificant. The other thing we get from this data is the width of the peak. A wide peak shows us that other colors were used to make that one color. For red, green, and blue, we should see narrow peaks because there are dedicated red, green, and blue LEDs. For yellow, it’s a mix of the different LEDs to obtain yellow, so we’d expect the peak to be wider. However, since yellow is a mix of the colors, the peak’s location can tend to be far from “true” yellow, which affects how nice of a yellow we see.

This helped confirm why some of the colors were inaccurate, especially with the Meross bulb which appeared abnormally bright for its lumen rating. You can see that the green color is significantly blueish, and also that the peak is extremely wide. This makes the green color very bright, but not very accurate. You can also see that the yellow is a bit orangey as well.

Anyway, I hope this data helps you out.

Ok, now let’s talk about my favorites and least favorites.

Favorites

For the best high end bulb, I’d put my money on the LiFX color bulb. I know it’s pretty expensive, but it’s more of an art piece than a bulb that hide under a lamp shade. That being said, I’d choose it anyday over the Philips Hue bulb.

If you’re just looking for the brightest bulb, the Wyze bulb is a great choice. That combined with the fact that it appears to work locally with Home Assistant makes it a great choice. I really do like how bright it is, and may use it for some ambient lighting in my videos.

If you’re just looking for the best bulb for the price, I think a great cheap option is the Kasa smart bulb, which had decent color accuracy, an excellent yellow color, and works locally with Home Assistant.

For a mid-range bulb that has top tier compatibility, I’d choose the Yeelight bulb, as it’s compatible with the top 6 smart home platforms, and the bulbs operate without the need for cloud connectivity.

If you want a Zigbee bulb, the best in my opionion is the Innr bulb, although the price is a bit steep. If you want a Z-Wave bulb, the only one I looked at was the Inovelli.

Least Favorites

Ok, so here are the ones I would NOT recommend.

I’ll admit I’ve had a bias against this bulb from the start because of how much I spent on it, but the Philips Hue bulb is a no-go for me. The fact that it can’t be reset and put into pairing mode again without the need for custom software or ANOTHER Hue product is ridiculous, and it’s not something that the Smart Home community should stand for. That, combined with the fact that the yellow color quality was low and the price is super high hinders me from recommending this bulb.

The next one I would steer clear from is the Nanoleaf bulb. While it has some serious style, I was not at all impressed with it’s brightness or color accuracy, or really even the app. It doesn’t have enough going for it to merit the $20 price tag in my opinion. The Matter version is pretty cool, but I’m not sure that I’d buy it just for that.

The third least favorite is the Tradfri bulb. I had high expectations, but mine was defective, so I really can’t recommend it. It also seemed a bit cheap quality wise for the price.

Reminder & Thank You

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this article and it helps you sort through some of the smart bulbs that are out there. Don’t forget though that a smart bulb isn’t necessarily the best way to go in every situation, and you may find that a smart light switch is a better way to go.

If you did enjoy the article, please take a second to share it with a friend! Also, links are in a table at the top – if you buy any of these bulbs through my links, I get a small commission at no cost to you! Thanks for your support!

Check out my YouTube channel if you want to see more comparisons like this in video form! Thanks for reading!

Best Contact Sensors for Home Assistant

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What’s up Smart Homers! Contact sensors, sometimes called door or window sensors, seem like a pretty simple thing. But why are there so many out there on Amazon, and what are the differences? In this article (which is a written version of my latest video) I’m doing a review of 10 different contact sensors. I bought a bunch from a few different brands and will compare their prices and features, and I’ll also give you some ideas for how they can be used around the house. 

At the end I’ll give my recommendation and some honorable mentions.

Requirements

The requirements for my contact sensor selection are that they have to work with Home Assistant, they have to be available on Amazon, they can’t require any other hub than a Zigbee or Z-Wave dongle, and they need to cost less than $50 (US).

Of the 10 contact sensors that I chose, none of them are WiFi devices. This is simply because most of the WiFi ones I saw were Tuya powered, which I want to stay away from if I can (since I don’t want to rely on the cloud) and also a lot of them are big and clunky because of the large batteries required to keep connected to WiFi. For these reasons, we’ll only be looking at Zigbee and Z-Wave devices, and I’ll be adding them to Home Assistant using ZHA and Z-Wave JS.

Also note that all of these sensors are reported to work with Smart Things.

For each of the contact sensors, I’ve done testing to determine how close the sensor needs to be to the magnet before it is “closed”, and again how far it needs to be for the sensor to be “open”. In some cases, this data differs from what is advertised. It’s worth noting that the magnet part of the sensor can typically be changed out with a stronger magnet to change these data.

Overview

Here are the technical specs of the different sensors I tried. Because prices vary, I rated them from 1 to 4 dollar signs (“$”), where “$” is 0 to $20, “$$” is $20 to $30, etc. all the way up to $50.

NameProtocol Battery CD*InstallationPrice
Aqara Door and Window SensorZigbeeCR163211mm / 14mmAdhesive$
Sengled Smart Window & Door SensorZigbeeCR163210mm / 12mmAdhesive$
Linkind Door Window SensorZigbeeDL203216mm / 29mmAdhesive, bracket$
SONOFF ZigBee Door Window SensorZigbeeCR20329mm / 12mmAdhesive$
THIRDREALITY Zigbee Contact SensorZigbeeAAA (x2)33mm / 45mm +/-2mmAdhesive, screw$
AduroSmart ERIA Door Window SensorZigbeeCR203211mm / 12mmAdhesive, screw$
Centralite Micro Door SensorZigbeeCR245032mm / 35mmAdhesive, screw$$
Ecolink Z-wave Door & Window SensorZ-WaveCR123A21mm / 26mmAdhesive, screw$$$
Aeotec Recessed Door Sensor 7Z-Wave +CR123A 9mm / 15mmRecessed, screw$$$
Fibaro Door / Window Sensor 2Z-Wave +ER1425012mm / 16mmAdhesive, screw$$$$
Some links are affiliate links.

*CD is the measured contact distances (closed/open)

Zigbee Contact Sensors

Let’s start by looking at the contact sensors that use Zigbee protocol.

Aqara Door and Window Sensor

The first one I want to look at is the Aqara Door and Window Sensor. This is one of the most popular contact sensors for Home Assistant users, and Smart Homers in general. Of all the sensors in this article, this one is the smallest and I think is the least noticeable. It has Aqara’s typical grey and white modern look which makes it fit well in the modern home.

Although Aqara’s description of this sensor on Amazon says that an Aqara hub is required, that’s not really the case. I’ve paired many Aqara devices with ZHA with no trouble, and this was no different. Pressing the small reset button located on one side of the sensor allowed me to easily pair it with ZHA. In Home Assistant the device shows up with two entities, a binary sensor for the open and closed states, and a power sensor the reports the battery life.

Aqara has become a big name in the smart home community, and for good reason. Their reliable sensors typically have great battery life, and the signal range is excellent in my experience. I have two of these sensors mounted on my garage doors to tell me if they are open or closed. They stay connected to my Nortek USB radio better than some of the other sensors in my house that are a bit closer, and after 6 months they are both at roughly 60% battery. One of the garage doors I open every day, and one I rarely do, but the battery percentages are both about the same.

Another fun way I’ve used this sensor is by attaching it to my projector screen so that Home Assistant knows if it is open or closed. I did a whole video on automating my projector setup, but this will be an added feature. The only downside with this sensor is that, when mounted with the adhesive provided, the battery cover is not accessible, so changing out the battery requires you to remove it from the mounting surface.

Sengled Smart Window and Door Sensor

The Sengled contact sensor was the first Zigbee sensor I bought for my smart home, back before I made the switch from SmartThings. They are a little bit bigger than the Aqara sensor, and not quite as good looking in my opinion, but they are solid white, so they blend in fairly well with white trim. There is no visible marking on the device except for an engraved infinity symbol on the top, which is not really an eyesore at all. Overall these sensors have performed well, although I do have one sensor that seems to drop out and become “unavailable” in Home Assistant. This sensor is on our deck door, which is pretty far from the hub, but closer than the Aqara sensors on the garage doors. Opening the deck door seems to wake the sensor up and it functions properly after that. I may try getting a Zigbee repeater since I do not have any in my network.

Pairing this sensor with Home Assistant was super easy using ZHA – all I had to do was press and hold the reset button with a sim card tool until the red LED under the cover flashed, causing the button to be recognized immediately. In Home Assistant the device shows up with two entities just a like the Aqara sensor, a binary sensor for the open and closed states, and a power sensor that reports the battery life.

Linkind Door Window Sensor

The lowest priced of all of the sensors in this article is the Linkind Door Window sensor. Linkind has a line of Zigbee smart home products that are often extremely cheap on Amazon. The sensor has their brand name written in large, dark letters on the side, which some people might find aesthetically unappealing, but otherwise the sensor has a clean cut look to it. I tried removing the logo with Isopropyl alcohol as well as by scraping and sanding, but it wasn’t easy to do and while the alcohol did nothing, I kind of made it look worse with the sanding. A solution to this could be to just replace the magnet part of the sensor with a better looking magnet, or just don’t use the sensor where it is visible.

 While the previous two sensors only come with adhesive as a mounting option, this one comes with a plastic bracket that the sensor body clips onto. The bracket has a 3M adhesive back, but also has screw holes and comes with screws and anchors for an alternate mounting method. The magnet part of this device only has an adhesive back, so it can’t be screw-mounted.

Pairing with ZHA was pretty straightforward – there is a pinhole for a sim card tool to access the pairing button, but when you first remove the battery isolator tab, it’s automatically put into pairing mode, so the pairing button is only needed when you want to re-pair the device. In Home Assistant the device shows up with two entities like the previous devices, a binary sensor for the open and closed states, and a power sensor that reports the battery life.

I used this sensor for an idea I got from Dr. Zzs. I put it on the toilet lid in my bathroom, so if the lid is lifted, the fan comes on, and a smart plug with an air freshener turns on. I’m not sure this one will pass the wife approval, but it was still fun to try.

Sonoff ZigBee Wireless Door Window Sensor

The next one I want to look at is the Sonoff ZigBee Wireless Door Window Sensor. This sensor has the same sharp, square design that many of the Sonoff products have. It has tiny little arrows on the front to show where the sensor should line up to the magnet, but no other visible markings.

It comes with adhesive backing, but no screw mounting option. Honestly the sensor looks kind of boxy when mounted to your trim, and since it has such a sharp outline, it doesn’t blend well with my door casing.

Pairing this device with Home Assistant in ZHA was pretty simple. All I had to do was press and hold the reset button with a mechanical pencil until the LED under the cover flashed red causing the button to be recognized immediately. It’s kind of annoying that it doesn’t come with some kind of sim card tool like the Sengled sensor does, but hey, I guess they saved some money on that. In Home Assistant, once again the device shows up with two entities, a binary sensor for the open and closed states, and a power sensor the reports the battery life.

ThirdReality Zigbee Contact Sensor

This next sensor is pretty unique. One of the standout features of the ThirdReality Zigbee Contact Sensor is that it is powered by 2 triple A batteries. For someone who doesn’t want to stock a bunch of extra batteries, it’s pretty great that this sensor can use typical household batteries. However, the 2 AAA batteries do make the body of the sensor pretty chonky – it’s pretty much the size of 3 Aqara sensors. But this isn’t the thiccest sensor we are looking at today – stick around to see even bigger! The sensor can be mounted with adhesive or screws – to mount with screws, the entire body of the sensor can be opened, allowing the provided screws to be run through the screw holes and into whatever you’re mounting it to. One weird thing with this sensor is that the magnet portion is about half the thickness of the sensor. While this doesn’t prevent the sensor from sensing the magnet, it kind of looks weird and you need to add some sort of spacer if you want them to be flush with one another.

Adding this button to Home Assistant was simple since installing the batteries for the first time put the sensor into pairing mode. When the batteries are installed, a blue LED begins flashing indicating it is ready to pair. If you want to pair it in future, you are required to access the pairing button which is inside the sensor housing. Once it was added, it showed the binary open/closed sensor and battery percentage sensor.

When I added this sensor 11 days ago it was at 27% battery, and then at some point it went as high as 42%, and now it’s down to 38%. It doesn’t seem to me that the battery percentage reported is super reliable for this sensor. I used this sensor on my child safety gate at the top of my stairs, replacing the sensor I used to have there. It can trigger alerts if the gate is left open and the baby is crawling around.

AduroSmart ERIA Smart Home Door Window Sensor

The AduroSmart ERIA sensor is another uniquely styled device, and one that I think really looks good. While it is a bit larger than the Aqara and Sengled sensors, it has a look that I personally like – it’s not ugly, but it’s not trying to hide either. The solid white color and the nice rounded corners, make it look really clean, and the square-shaped indicated in its corner really makes it stand out. The indicator blinks green when the sensor is either opened or closed, but as far as I know there’s no way to turn it off. It can be mounted with either screws or adhesive (although the magnet can only be mounted with adhesive) using a pretty clever mounting plate design. The sensor can be slid into place onto the provided mounting plate after the plate is mounted with screws or adhesive. This makes changing out the battery a lot quicker than other devices like the Aqara or the Sengled sensors, because you can slide it off of the plate and change the battery. 

One issue I had was that the battery contacts inside the sensor were forcing the battery back out of its slot when I tried to put it in, so I actually had to bend the contact so that it wasn’t pushing the battery out anymore.

Once I got the battery in, adding the device to Home Assistant went pretty smoothly. The sensor was put into pairing mode as soon as the battery was installed, and was instantly recognized by ZHA. There’s also a pinhole that gives access to the reset button if you need to re-pair it. There are the typical two entities showing up in Home Assistant, the open/closed state and the battery percentage.

Centralite Micro Door Sensor

The next sensor I want to show you, the Centralite Micro Door Sensor, is the last of the Zigbee sensors in this article. It is also the most expensive of the Zigbee devices, the first one over $20 US. It has an interesting design, with one of the most obvious features being an array of holes on the front of the sensor housing. These holes allow ambient air to reach a temperature sensor inside. That’s right, this device is two sensors in one unit! It also has a reset button on one side, and it has some hash marks on the front of the magnet and sensor. It has a very simplistic look, without trying too hard, and I like it. It also has a battery hatch release button that pops the battery tray out to one side when pressed. This makes it easy to change out the battery without pulling it off of the wall.

This sensor can be mounted with the provided adhesive or screws. It comes with screw mounting brackets for both the sensor and the magnet, so both can be attached to the wall with screws, and then the magnet and sensor clip into them. However, the screws provided are machine screws, not wood screws, so they really aren’t the best for attaching to a door or door frame. Machine screws are typically for metal or plastic.

It’s different than the previous sensors we’ve looked at when it comes to the contact distance. Based on my testing, this sensor has a contact distance that is much larger than the previous sensors, which means the door or window you are sensing will need to be open wider in order for the sensor to recognize it as open, and if a door is not closed fully, it may still tell you that it’s closed.

Adding the device to Home Assistant was fairly straightforward. For first time pairing, you pull the battery isolator out by the tab and it goes directly into pairing mode demonstrated by a flashing LED that can be seen through the temperature sensor holes on the front, and it’s fairly quickly picked up by ZHA. If you want to re-pair it, you need to perform a reset by opening the battery tray, holding down the reset button, and then closing the tray. In HA, the device has three entities: a binary sensor for the contact state, a temperature sensor, and power sensor for the battery percentage.

I used this sensor in my refrigerator to monitor the temperature of the fridge, as well as send alerts if the door is left open for too long. It’s hardly noticeable, and the wide sensing distance helps with placement of the sensor.

Z-Wave Contact Sensors

Ecolink Z-Wave Plus Rare Earth Magnet Door Window Sensor

Now let’s take a look at Z-Wave contact sensors. The first one is the Ecolink Door Window sensor. This monster of a sensor is the largest contact sensor I’ve ever seen, and definitely the largest in this review. It has an LED on the body that flashes when it senses open or closed, and stays lit when the cover is removed. This is because it has a tamper sensor so that you can be alerted if someone is trying to bypass or disable it. What you’ll also notice when you have the cover off is a set of screw terminals that allow you to hook up a wired sensor. This can be a contact sensor or any other type of dry contact, and allows so that the body of the sensor itself doesn’t even have to be close to the point of contact. Here I’m demonstrating with a momentary push-button switch. You could put the sensor in a dry, safe place, and then put a more weather resistant, wired contact sensor outdoors. All you would do is connect the two wires from the wired sensor to the terminals here, and when the wired sensor was “made” or closed, the Ecolink sensor would report that it was open, or vice versa.

The cover of the device also has an arrow on the one side, showing where the magnet needs to be aligned to it. Ecolink actually advertises the battery life at 3 years, and after more than 10 days the sensor is still reporting 100% battery. It can be mounted with either the 3M adhesive or the screws provided, and on this one, both the sensor body and the magnet itself can be screw mounted. A mounting plate is provided for the body of the sensor so that it can be clipped onto the plate once the plate is screw mounted. The plate is designed so that it clicks into place, and the cover has to be removed to release the plate. That’s smart so that you get a cover open alert if someone tries to remove it.

One of the most unique things is that this sensor comes with a complete second housing, a brown one instead of white. This gives you multiple options depending on where you’re mounting it.

Adding this device to Home Assistant is not too complicated. Put Z-Wave JS into inclusion mode, and then pull the battery isolator tab on the back of the device. As soon as you do this it instantly begins the interview process, the LED on the front turning solid green. Once connected, you’ll see quite a few different entities that show up. You have the “cover removed” entity which I’ve already explained, you have a “low battery level” sensor which would turn on if battery gets critically low, you have the open/closed contact sensor, a “replace battery” sensor, and the battery level.

Aeotec Recessed Door Sensor 7

The next Z-Wave sensor is the Aeotec Recessed Door Sensor 7. This device stands out from the rest because of its mounting method. Rather than being an adhesive or screw on mount, this sensor is made to be recessed into a door. This allows for a very discreet sensor, that isn’t standing out and noticeable to most people. For both parts of the sensor, 3/4” holes need to be drilled, one in the door that is a little over 2 and a half inches deep, and the other in the door-jamb that is a little over a half of an inch deep. Then the sensor can be inserted into the one hole and the magnet into the other. The sensor part can be screwed into the door by its flange using the provided screws, but the magnet part should be glued into its hole.

The sensor supports S2 security and uses a 700 series Z-Wave module, allowing it to have fast response time and a long battery life. The battery life on this device is advertised at 3+ years. It uses the same type of battery as the Ecolink sensor a CR123A.

To add the device to Home Assistant, you have to use a screwdriver to pop off the flange of the sensor part. Then, use your fingers to slide the circuit board out of the cylinder. You should see the battery, and the tab of the battery isolator. Pull the tab, and then slide the board back into the cylinder. Next, put Z-Wave JS into inclusion mode, and then press the button on the end of the circuit board. An LED should begin flashing showing that it is in pairing mode. Once it is picked up by Home Assistant, you can snap the flange back into place on the face of the sensor. In the future you can use the hole on the face of the sensor to access the inclusion button. In Home Assistant you have quite a few entities like we did with the Ecolink. There’s a low battery sensor, open/closed sensor, and battery level sensor, but there is also a “power applied” sensor and a “software failure” sensor. I’m really not sure what these two do.

This sensor works great in applications where you don’t want people seeing the sensor, but it does require you to make a hole in your door, and may not work well in a metal door, although mine did, because metal enclosures can disrupt a Z-Wave signal. These are some things to consider when you’re looking at this sensor.

Fibaro Door / Window Sensor 2

Last but not least, we have the most expensive of all of the sensors we’re looking at today, the Fibaro Door / Window Sensor 2. This Z-Wave device is larger than the Aeotec, but still smaller than the Ecolink. It has a clean and futuristic rounded look that makes you want to pick it up for some weird reason. It has the Fibaro brand printed on the top, but it’s not too intrusive. In contrast with the large size of the sensor, the magnet part of the device is tiny as small as the Aqara sensor’s magnet! It looks like a tiny pill, but this small size does mean that you have to make sure it is lined up properly with the sensor. There is a marking on one side of the sensor and magnet to help with this. One of the device’s stand-out features is that it has a temperature sensor inside it.

The sensor can be mounted with screws or the adhesive backing, but the magnet can only be mounted with the adhesive backing. There is a curved strip of hard plastic on the back that bulges out so it’s not flush with the back of the sensor. Under this plastic is a button that will be depressed when the sensor is mounted to a flat surface. If you pop open the cover, you’ll see another switch inside that is depressed when the cover is in place. These two buttons are used to trigger the tamper alert if the cover is taken off or if the sensor is pulled off of the wall. 

These buttons are also used to pair the device in Home Assistant. To do so, you have to hold down one of the buttons, and then triple click the other one. This puts the device in pairing mode. Alternatively, you could mount it to the door or door frame first, effectively depressing one of the buttons (the one on the back), and then triple click the other button. In Home Assistant there are quite a few entities that show up – more than any of the other sensors in this article, actually. It has the door open or closed sensor, battery percentage, temperature, cover removed, low battery, replace battery, overheat, and underheat. The Cover Removed sensor’s status will be “Unsafe” until both buttons are depressed for about 5 seconds, at which point it becomes “Safe”. However, as soon as one of the buttons is released – if it’s pulled off of the mounting surface or the cover is taken off – it becomes Unsafe again. This could be useful if you wanted to set off an alarm that would be triggered if someone tampered with your sensor.

Favorites & Honorable Mentions

For a budget and basic Zigbee contact sensor, you really can’t go wrong with the Aqara sensor. It has great battery life, with what seems like a decent range compared to some of the others, and looks really good and minimalist when mounted on a door frame. If you’re looking for something similar, but a Z-Wave device, there is another sensor I didn’t cover in this article, but I would recommend – the Zooz ZSE41 Open Close Sensor. You can get this device for fairly cheap at the Smartest House when it’s on sale, and for a couple extra dollars you can pick up the waterproof case that’s designed for it. I covered this sensor in my Mailbox Notifications in Home Assistant video, so if you want to see more about it, check out that video.

If you’re looking for a Zigbee sensor that costs a little more, but also has a temperature sensor, the Centralite contact sensor is a pretty good option. There is another contact sensor that also reports temperature that I would recommend, and that’s the SmartThings/Aeotec Multipurpose sensor. The reason I didn’t cover it is because it isn’t offered on Amazon currently, and is almost always out of stock when it is. This is for good reason, because not only does it have a temperature sensor, it also has a vibration sensor as well. If you want something that has a little longer range, has a temperature sensor, and still looks good, Fibaro might be good for you, but it has quite a price tag!

If you’re looking for a sensor that is fairly well hidden, I would definitely recommend the Aeotec Recessed Door Window sensor. It’s super cool that you can have a wireless sensor that is hidden so nicely. A tamper sensor is not needed if the unwanted visitor doesn’t know it’s even there!

Least Favorites

Here are the ones I would NOT recommend.

First, the Sengled sensor. Don’t get me wrong, the sensor works great, but when you compare it to the Aqara sensor, there’s no contest. I have more Sengled sensors than any of the others, but it’s more expensive than the Aqara and apparently has worse range. Also, I really don’t think it looks as good.

Next, the ThirdReality contact sensor. Even though it takes 2 AAA batteries, it is way too big, and it doesn’t have enough features to make up for its size like the Ecolink does. On top of that, the battery reporting is definitely broken in Home Assistant – at least it is on mine, so I would not recommend you buy this one.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Home Automation Ideas

Ten Easy Home Automation Ideas

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What’s up Smart Homers! In this article I want to show you 10 different home automation ideas that you can try out in your home. See the video version here.

I always enjoy hearing ideas that other people have for automations, because it gives me ideas for new automations for my smart home, as well as ideas for ways to improve my current automations. Most of these automations are done using a hub like SmartThings or Home Assistant.

1. Bathroom Fan Automation

The first automation is a very simple one. In our house, we don’t have timer switches for our bathroom fans (which are annoying to use in my opinion), so sometimes our bathroom fan gets left on. For example, maybe I take a shower before going out for dinner, but I forget to turn the fan off because I’m in a rush. Now the fan may run the entire time that I’m gone. A simple automation can be made to turn the fan off after a maximum amount of time – say 30 minutes. Then you can turn the fan on and forget about it – no need to set a timer either. This automation is so simple that it can even be done in the Tuya Smart Life app if you have a Tuya smart switch – no hub or Assistant integration needed!

To set this automation up in the Tuya Smart Life app, tap the “Smart” icon on the bottom button bar, and then tap the plus ( + ) icon in the upper right corner. For the “Set a condition” part of the automation, you should choose “When device status changes”. Then, choose the fan switch from the list of devices, and then choose “ON”. What this is doing is triggering the automation when the fan switch is turned on. Now the “Set up task” screen is displayed. Here we will tell the fan to turn off after a delay of a certain amount of time. First, tap “Delay the action” and set the delay time for however long you’d like. I set it to 30 minutes. Tap “Next”, and then tap the blue plus ( + ) in the “Task” section to choose what happens after the 30 minute delay. Tap “Run the device”, again choose your fan switch from the list, and then choose “OFF”. Tap “Next”, and then you can name your automation and then save it! And that’s it! Your automation should look similar to the one shown below.


2. Laundry Notifications

The next automation is one that I’ve made a (fairly bad) YouTube video about. Often washers and dryers come with tones or buzzers that go off when a cycle is complete, but If the laundry machines in your house are too far away from the main living area, the alarms may not be loud enough. If you have small kids, the alarms could be too loud, waking them up during nap time. A solution to this is to create an automation that alerts you via phone notification or smart speaker when the cycle is complete. One way to do this is to use a power monitoring plug to monitor the power of the appliance, and when the power draw drops down below a certain threshold, send an alert indicating that the cycle is complete. In the video I showed how to do this with SmartThings, but it can also be done with Home Assistant. For this automation, I used a Zooz ZEN15 power monitoring smart plug for each appliance, which worked extremely well.

The theory of how a cycle’s beginning and end are determined

3. Freezer Alerts

Another power monitoring automation that is useful to set and forget is one that will notify you if your freezer stops working. We have a chest freezer in our garage, and we would lose quite a bit of food if it stopped working (it actually happened one time, and it was BAD). An automation can be written to send a notification to your phone if the power stays below a certain value for too long. You can also monitor the cycling of the freezer, and if the power draw is higher than normal, the lid may be left open or there could be other problems with your freezer. The image below shows a trend of my chest freezer’s power consumption over time.

Trend of My Chest Freezer’s Power Usage Over Time
(Lovelace Dashboard in Home Assistant)
# Alert me if the freezer dies
alias: Freezer Alert
description: ''
trigger:
  - type: power
    platform: device
    device_id: e8ae80fdf8979cc3199ce8f4c38cdb1e
    entity_id: sensor.freezer_plug_electric_consumed_a
    domain: sensor
    below: 1
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 30
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 0
condition: []
action:
  - service: notify.mobile_app_oneplus7
    data:
      message: The chest freezer hasn't been running for 30 minutes!
mode: singleCode language: YAML (yaml)

4. Garage Door Actionable Notification

This automation is one that I’ve only created in Home Assistant – not sure if it can be done in SmartThings. Occasionally the garage door is left open while working around the house, which really affects our utility bills. I created an actionable notification in Home Assistant that notifies me if the garage door has been open for 10 minutes. The notification also has an action button on it that can be tapped to close the garage door. This way I can know that the door is open and can close it from anywhere! Let’s say I’m working on a project in the garage and I leave to go to the hardware store, and I forget to close the garage door. I’m at the store or on the way and I get the notification. I can just tap the button and close it without having to go into the app. You can also have this notification appear if everyone leaves the house and the garage door is left open. If you want to learn more about setting up actionable notifications in Home Assistant, there’s a video by Everything Smart Home that goes over how to set them up on iPhone and Android that I recommend watching. I’ve left the YAML code that I used for this automation below.

Example Actionable Notification
# Actionable Notification when Garage Door is Left Open
alias: 'Notification + Action: Garage Door 1 Left Open'
description: ''
trigger:
  - type: opened
    platform: device
    device_id: 951301691042564e1c8e1b3e0af185e3
    entity_id: binary_sensor.garage_door_1_sensor
    domain: binary_sensor
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 10
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 0
condition: []
action:
  - service: notify.mobile_app_oneplus7
    data:
      message: Garage Door 1 was left open!
      data:
        actions:
          - action: CLOSE_GARAGE_DOOR_1
            title: Close Door
  - wait_for_trigger:
      - platform: event
        event_type: mobile_app_notification_action
        event_data:
          action: CLOSE_GARAGE_DOOR_1
    timeout: '00:30:00'
    continue_on_timeout: false
  - service: switch.turn_on
    target:
      entity_id: switch.garage_door_opener_1
  - service: notify.mobile_app_oneplus7
    data:
      message: Closing Garage Door 1.
mode: single
Code language: PHP (php)

5. Door Left Open Alerts

Another, very similar, automation is one that alerts you when a door has been left open. In the summer the kids sometimes leave the door open and let bugs and heat in, so I made an automation for each exterior door that sends a phone notification if it has been open for 10 minutes. When a door is left open for 10 minutes, a notification comes to my phone telling me which one is open. I have also set up my wall mounted control panel in my Kitchen to display the status of each door, so that you can see which doors are open with a quick glance. I made a step by step video guide on making a wall mounted control panel with Home Assistant, if you’re interested!

Wall-Mounted Control Panel (Lovelace Dashboard in Home Assistant)
# Sample code when a particular door is left open
alias: 'Notification: Garage Man Door Left Open'
description: ''
trigger:
  - type: opened
    platform: device
    device_id: 99b9e7bc94b8c43a248896588b4fa24c
    entity_id: binary_sensor.sengled_garage_mandoor
    domain: binary_sensor
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 5
      seconds: 0
      milliseconds: 0
condition: []
action:
  - service: notify.mobile_app_oneplus7
    data:
      message: The Garage Man Door was left open!
mode: singleCode language: PHP (php)

6. NFC Tag on the Nightstand

The next automation is one that I use every single day, and one of the most useful to me. Most smart homers probably create scenes in their various home automation platforms that are set at certain times each day, or when certain actions take place. We have an “evening” scene that starts at 8pm every night which changes all of the smart bulb color temperatures from daylight to warm white, and turns on all the nightlights. A good friend once said, “Daylight is clean, but warm white is comforting“. Words to live by. When we go to bed, we want to trigger our “nighttime” scene, which turns off all of the lights but the nightlights. Since we don’t consistently go to bed at the same time every night, we need a way to trigger this scene when we go to bed. To do this I have placed an NFC tag on my nightstand and have an automation that triggers the nighttime scene when I put my phone on my nightstand.

It might not seem like it’s a lot easier than opening the app and triggering the scene, but just setting the phone down and triggering it is really smooth. The only problem I have with this automation is that your phone has to be unlocked in order for the NFC tag to be read. I’ve considered switching to a smart button, but the NFC tags are way cheaper and don’t require batteries. These NFC tag automations can be triggered from an Android or iPhone, but how difficult they are to set up depends on the hub you use. I’ve set this automation up on both SmartThings and Home Assistant, and Home Assistant was easier by far since it has built-in NFC reading capability. If you want to see how to set these kinds of automations up with Smart Things, Smart Home Solver has made an excellent video covering how to create these automations using both iPhone and Android.

alias: Nightstand Lights Out
description: ''
trigger:
  - platform: tag
    tag_id: fcf40478-a889-4059-bd9f-4029b15206c0
condition:
  - condition: time
    after: '20:00'
    before: '5:00'
action:
  - scene: scene.nighttime
mode: singleCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

7. Controlling a Window AC with a Nest Thermostat

Another automation I recently started using allows me to control my window AC unit with my Nest Thermostat. I only have central Air Conditioning on the 2nd floor of my house, so the basement only has baseboard heat and no cooling. I installed the window AC unit in a basement window, but I wanted to have it controlled by the basement thermostat for my heating system. The GE air conditioning unit I bought is HomeKit compatible, so I used the HomeKit integration to connect it to Home Assistant. Once working with Home Assistant, I set up an automation that turns on the AC unit and sets the temperature when the Nest thermostat temperature is higher than its setpoint. It works super well, and I’m very pleased with it!

This one was a little more complicated than the others, but not too bad. First you need to make two template sensors. The first simply takes the setpoint temperature attribute of the Nest climate entity and makes it its own sensor. Then you create a template sensor that compares (subtracts) the actual temperature measured by the thermostat and the setpoint of the thermostat (that first sensor you created). This sensor’s value will indicate how much cooler or warmer the room is than the setpoint of the thermostat. 

# Make the temp setpoint sensor from Basement climate entity

  - platform: template
    sensors:
      basement_temperature_setpoint:
        friendly_name: "Basement Thermostat Temperature Setpoint"
        unit_of_measurement: 'deg F'
        value_template: "{{ state_attr('climate.basement', 'temperature') }}"Code language: PHP (php)
# subtract to get the difference
  - platform: template
    sensors:
      basement_temp_vs_setpoint:
        friendly_name: "Basement Temp vs Setpoint"
        unit_of_measurement: 'deg F'
        value_template: "{{ (((states('sensor.basement_temperature') | float)) - ((states('sensor.basement_temperature_setpoint') | float))) | round(1) }}"Code language: PHP (php)

So now I have the comparison of the two sensors, let’s look at them. I made a little Lovelace card to help me visualize the two. The image below shows that the actual temperature of the basement is 1.4 degrees cooler than the setpoint. Since the basement is cooler, we don’t want the AC on, so we should leave it.

This next image shows that the actual temperature of the basement is 2.4 degrees warmer than the setpoint. Since the thermostat only controls baseboard heat, it can’t help alleviate this situation.

In comes the automation! The following automation waits for the basement temperature to be more than 2 degrees over the thermostat’s setpoint for at least 5 minutes, and then tells the AC to turn on.

alias: Basement Window AC on if Actual Temp Above Thermo Setpoint
description: ''
trigger:
  - platform: numeric_state
    entity_id: sensor.basement_temp_vs_setpoint
    for: '00:05:00'
    above: '2'
condition: []
action:
  - device_id: 928d3f8c2b086c263410e0e7ead1f2d5
    domain: climate
    entity_id: climate.basement_window_ac
    type: set_hvac_mode
    hvac_mode: cool
mode: singleCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

I then wrote another automation to turn the AC off once it has reached the setpoint (within 1 degree) of the thermostat and remained there for 5 minutes.

alias: Basement Window AC off if Actual Temp Reaches Thermo Setpoint
description: ''
trigger:
  - platform: numeric_state
    entity_id: sensor.basement_temp_vs_setpoint
    for: '00:05:00'
    below: '1'
condition: []
action:
  - device_id: 928d3f8c2b086c263410e0e7ead1f2d5
    domain: climate
    entity_id: climate.basement_window_ac
    type: set_hvac_mode
    hvac_mode: 'off'
mode: singleCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

And that’s it! This one is set and forget!

8. Controlling a Humidifier with a Nest Thermostat

Another climate type automation that is similar the previous one involves the humidity in your home. In the winter months, our house becomes very dry and we often run a humidifier in the main living area of our house. To help control the humidity, I put the humidifier on a smart plug, and created an automation that turns it on if the humidity (measured by my Nest thermostat) goes below a certain threshold. Then I created another automation to turn it off once the humidity exceeds the threshold. This automation has worked well in both Home Assistant and SmartThings – now all I need to do is remember to add water to the humidifier when it runs out!

alias: Turn on Humidifier (Living Room Thermo)
description: ''
trigger:
  - platform: numeric_state
    entity_id: sensor.living_room_humidity
    for: '00:10:00'
    below: '35'
condition: []
action:
  - type: turn_on
    device_id: 17d4abecbfadf7295994cdf7b0ea355b
    entity_id: switch.humidifier_switch
    domain: switch
mode: singleCode language: JavaScript (javascript)
alias: Turn off Humidifier (Living Room Thermo)
description: ''
trigger:
  - platform: numeric_state
    entity_id: sensor.living_room_humidity
    for: '00:10:00'
    above: '40'
condition: []
action:
  - type: turn_off
    device_id: 17d4abecbfadf7295994cdf7b0ea355b
    entity_id: switch.humidifier_switch
    domain: switch
mode: singleCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

9. Lighting with PLEX and Google TV

Lighting with PLEX and Google TV
If you’ve never used PLEX media server, I highly recommend it. It allows you to stream audio, video, and image files that you have in your library to a variety of devices, including Chromecast with Google TV. It also integrates with Home Assistant, allowing you to control the playback and some other things, as well as use its state as an automation trigger. I created an automation that sets the lighting scene in our kids’ media area when PLEX begins playing a movie or show. This is actually very useful because then I don’t have to go over to the switch, talk to Alexa/Google Home, or pull out my phone in order to dim the lights when the movie is playing. I don’t have smart blinds or window shades, but this would be an ideal way to close them automatically. I also created another automation that turns the lights up when PLEX is paused, like if someone needs to use the bathroom or you’re getting snacks. I’ve left the YAML code below if you want to check it out.

alias: Plex Lighting (Play)
 description: ''
 trigger:
 platform: device
 device_id: 0dc9a777ac431162de04eb2690f3dc35
 domain: media_player
 entity_id: media_player.plex_plex_for_android_tv_chromecast
 type: playing
 condition: []
 action:
 service: light.turn_off
 target:
   entity_id: light.basement_lights
 mode: single Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

alias: Plex Lighting (Pause)
 description: ''
 trigger:
 platform: device
 device_id: 0dc9a777ac431162de04eb2690f3dc35
 domain: media_player
 entity_id: media_player.plex_plex_for_android_tv_chromecast
 type: paused
 for:
   hours: 0
   minutes: 0
   seconds: 5
   milliseconds: 0
 condition: []
 action:
 service: light.turn_on
 target:
   entity_id:
     - light.basement_can_lights
     - light.basement_string_lights
 mode: single Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

10. Arming Your Security System When Leaving

If you have cameras that you use for security, or any other security devices, you may have them arm automatically at a certain time in the evening. But you may have to manually arm the security system when you leave the house during the day. It can make life easier to have an automation that automatically arms the system when you leave the house, an disarms the system when you leave. I have an automation set up that will “arm” my Blink camera system as well as Alexa Guard when both myself and my wife leave the house. To do this, I used Home Assistant with the Zone feature that detects if my wife or I are in the “Home” zone based on the location of our phones. If we both leave the zone, it arms both systems. You could also have Home Assistant alert you if you’ve left any doors open or unlocked when leaving. When one or both of us return home, another automation disarms the system conditionlally. If it is after 8pm, the systems stay armed.


Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you – thanks for reading all the way to the end! I hope these automation ideas were helpful and gave you some ideas of your own. If enjoyed this feel free to check out the other articles I’ve written! Also, check out my YouTube channel!