Investigations into the WIZ light bulb products available in Australia from Bunnings Wharehouse.
Over the weekend I purchased 2 Wiz lightbulbs and and remote control accessory.
My initial thoughts
- Its not compatible with Apple Home – only works with Apple Shortcuts
- Conection to WIFI was simple enough. Only a few seconds
- Light is quite bright. Two units successfully light up the bedroom
- Dimmer in nice and has enough graduations.
- Remote is easy to setup and use. Seems to be a bit of battery hog but I’m still trialing this.
15/06/21
After configuring the WIZ app, I have been working on the integration with my digital assistants to setup voice activation of the lights. Working with the iPhone you have the choice of using Google Home or Apple Shortcuts.
My initial quick take is that the Wiz lights integrate with Google home better than the Apple services. They are not compatible with Apple Home Kit.
As we are an Apple household and activating Google Home appears to require opening the app to change the light settings, I have decided to focus on integration with Apple Shortcuts initially.
After setting up you lights in the Wiz app, the next thing you need to do is create “Scenes” which involves setting your lights for a particular room and saving the details in a scene. Using this scene in the app, you can activate the scene by selecting it. One annoyance is that it appears that you can only activate a scene, not deactivate it. That means that when you want to turn off a particular scene, you need to have a scene to replace it with, which involves create a scene with all the lights off.
Once you have the screens created in the App, its a very quick process to create the Shortcuts to activate the scenes with Siri.
19/07/21
Just a quick update. The household has begun to accept the new lights. After a little bit of frustration initially, we are finding the ability to turn on and off lights as needed remotely to be quote useful. We now have 9 of our lights replaced with Wiz lights. Once everyone had the Wiz app installed on their phone and they were able to turn them on any off, they started to see the usefullness (any maybe the coolness) of an IOT lighting system.
I find the Remote Control accessory very usefull also. I use it in my bedroom. I have 2 scenes set up on the buttons on the remote so I can easily turn on and off lights to suit the situation. We have a showertime setup and the bed time setup which dims the lights.
I was trying to run the Wiz lights without signing into their cloud service but this was required to share the access to the system with other household members.