Philips Hue Bridge

The Philips Hue Bridge is the small white square that turns Hue from a handful of Bluetooth bulbs into a proper lighting system. It plugs into your router and takes the lights onto a Zigbee network of its own.

• What the Philips Hue Bridge unlocks
• Accessories are counted separately from bulbs
• Why Zigbee fixes the range problem
• Voice, and everything else it connects to
• Setting it up, and what it needs from your router

What the Philips Hue Bridge unlocks

Hue bulbs work on Bluetooth straight out of the box, and a lot of people never realise that is the limited version. Bluetooth reaches one room, handles about ten bulbs, and stops when you walk out of the door.

Add the Bridge and the lights move onto their own Zigbee network: up to 50 lights and up to 12 accessories, control from outside the house, schedules and routines, scenes across several rooms at once, and the entertainment features that sync lighting to what is on screen.

Accessories are counted separately from bulbs

The 12 accessories are dimmer switches, motion sensors, tap dials and buttons, and they do not eat into the 50-light allowance.

That matters when you plan a house. A corridor with a motion sensor at each end and a dimmer by the door uses three of the twelve and none of the fifty.

Why Zigbee fixes the range problem

On Bluetooth, every bulb talks to your phone and only your phone. On Zigbee, every bulb passes the signal to the next one.

So a light at the back of the house responds as quickly as the one in the hallway, and adding bulbs makes the network stronger rather than more crowded. In a compound where the far rooms never responded reliably, this is usually the fix.

Voice, and everything else it connects to

It works with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple HomeKit, so Siri, Alexa or Google can all run the lights depending on what the household carries.

Beyond voice it connects to a long list of other systems including SmartThings and IFTTT, which is how Hue ends up reacting to things that have nothing to do with lighting.

Setting it up, and what it needs from your router

A few minutes: ethernet cable to the router, power in, press the round button on the top, done. The cable is supplied. It draws under 0.1W on standby, so it can sit behind the router and be forgotten.

It needs a spare ethernet port, which is worth checking before you order if your router only has two and both are used. Our Hue bulbs and lighting pair to it directly, and Philips publish the full range at philips-hue.com.