WiFi Smart Bulb

A WiFi smart bulb E27 is the cheapest way to put a light on your phone. It goes into an ordinary holder, joins your Wi-Fi on its own with no hub to buy, and appears in the Tuya or Smart Life app.

• Pairing a WiFi smart bulb E27, and what goes wrong
• Where a colour bulb is actually useful
• Timers and schedules, without a hub
• Wi-Fi or Zigbee: which to buy
• One honest note on the figures

16 million colours, and a proper tunable white from 2700K warm to 6500K cool daylight for the rest of the time.

Pairing a WiFi smart bulb E27, and what goes wrong

Screw the bulb in, switch on, and it flashes to say it is ready to pair. The Smart Life app finds it and the whole job takes about two minutes.

It needs the 2.4GHz band. Like almost every Wi-Fi smart bulb, it cannot see a 5GHz network. If your router publishes both bands under one name, that is the reason pairing fails, and splitting the bands or temporarily turning off 5GHz fixes it. This catches more people than any other problem with these bulbs.

Where a colour bulb is actually useful

The colours sell the bulb and the tunable white is what gets used. 2700K warm in a sitting room in the evening, 6500K cool daylight in a kitchen or over a desk, from the same fitting.

The genuinely useful colour applications are narrower: a porch or gate light in a colour nobody else has, a child's room, a reading corner, or a room that gets used for gatherings. Buying colour for a corridor is money that does nothing.

Timers and schedules, without a hub

A porch light that comes on at dusk and goes off at midnight without anybody touching a switch is the automation people actually keep. It runs from the app with nothing else bought.

Countdowns work too, which is useful for a store room light that somebody always leaves on. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant work once the bulb is added.

Wi-Fi or Zigbee: which to buy

This one is Wi-Fi, and for one bulb or three that is the right choice because there is no gateway to buy.

Past about eight or ten smart devices, Wi-Fi starts to crowd a home router, and that is where the Zigbee version becomes the better answer: it needs a gateway, but it takes no router slots and every bulb strengthens the mesh.

One honest note on the figures

Wattage and lumen figures vary between production batches on this bulb. It is unbranded stock, and rather than publish a number that may not match the one in the box, we will read the label on the bulb we actually have.

Ask before ordering if the exact output matters, for example if you are matching it to existing bulbs in the same room. For a bulb with published, guaranteed figures and a manufacturer behind it, the Philips Hue range is the alternative. You will want Smart Life installed before the bulb arrives; it is a free download from Google Play.