Light up your life: strip lighting that’s sparkly and smart

I’ve long waxed lyrical about the benefits of LED lighting, and the introduction of Hue smart lights made it a colourful no-brainer for any smart home, including that of Cassa Pilch. Smart lights use less electricity than old-school incandescent bulbs and can switch to millions of combinations of colour and brightness. Best of all, they can be controlled using smart assistants like Alexa, Google, Siri, and others. Because of this, my residence is fully illuminated wherever possible using Philips Hue smart lights.

The only fly in the smart lighting ointment is Hue’s stiff price premium. If (like me) you need smart lighting with a high WAF (wife acceptance factor), such as being more affordable, Philips has you covered with its Wiz sub-brand. I’ve previously reviewed Wiz outdoor lights and was super impressed, so when WiZ’s Smart Flex Strip lights turned up at Witchdoctor towers, I was champing at the bit to get them lit up.

The WiZ Smart Flex Strip light is a 5-metre LED strip that can crank 840 lumens and over 16 million colours. Being Matter* compatible, it will play nice with Alexa, Google and Siri, giving it a solid measure of future-proofing. Further adding to its charm is its sticker price. Priced at $189, getting it up and running will also be a bank account-friendly undertaking. This is especially apparent when you compare the WiZ to Philips Ambiance Lightstrip Plus, which is an LED strip at roughly half the length but almost twice the price.

Getting set up proved to be a pretty bomb-proof undertaking. I simply mounted some brackets (which can be screwed in or stuck using the supplied adhesive tabs), placed the LED strip in the bracket to ensure it stayed in place and followed the steps outlined in the app pairing guide. The process requires you to download the WiZ app, and you’ll need to keep the instructions to scan the matter QR code. You’ll also need 2.4GHz Wi-Fi.

The WiZ LED Strip plugs into a supplied smart light switch, which is inserted into a power adaptor. It also has a 3M adhesive backing, but won’t win any beauty prizes. This is because it has both the LED strip (which connects to a short cable on the switch) and a power supply cable. In short, keeping the wire clutter out of sight is hard and looks a tad unsightly. The short cable run from the switch to the LED strip also limits where the switch can be placed. Here’s hoping WiZ invests in a wireless switch solution in their next version of this product.

That said, the strip can be trimmed every 25cm, and you can also buy LED extensions. Mounting the strip around corners is, at best, a fiddly task, so mounting it on straight edges is your best bet. Should corners be a non-negotiable part of your lighting plan, you can buy 6-pin corner mounts.

With the LED strip set up, I could put it through its paces. It’s super vibrant and can add loads of ambience to the bland white-on- white décor that characterises so many contemporary homes. The WiZ app is simple and not as feature-rich as the Hue app, but it offers many nifty features. These include 33 lighting presets with optional customisations. I particularly liked the rhythms feature that had the LED strip tweaking its brightness and colour to match the time of day and lighting scenes that can be scheduled.

Consumer tech is one of those industries where you get what you pay for, and exceptions to this are very rare. Thankfully, WiZ is one of them. With Wiz, you get the manufacturing quality you’d expect from Philips at an affordable price. You also get a solid mobile application and a simple setup process. They won’t work with the Hue app, but this isn’t a big deal, given the price difference on offer. These lights hit the sweet spot thanks to their price, Matter* support, great performance, and solid support.

* Matter support in lighting refers to the ability of smart light bulbs and lighting systems to work together with other smart home devices and platforms using a new, unified standard called Matter.

https://www.wizconnected.com/en-nz/products