Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Philips Hue Smart Dimmer Switch with Remote (Installation-Free Exclusive for Philips Hue Lights) (Old Version)

Top positive review

Love the switch. Perfect accessory to Alexa-controlled Hue lights.

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2017

Pros:
-- Seamless functionality
-- Easy to set up; easy to use
-- Attractive switch to hang on the wall
-- Removable, remote control very useful

Cons:
-- None evident at the moment

We have Philips hue light bulbs and a hue light switch in the bed room. We've been controlling them through the Amazon Echo. Echo and Alexa work well, but after a few months it grew wearisome to make the command each time we walked into the room. (The bulbs are in nightstand lights, and we don't have an overhead light.) Enter the Hue Dimmer Switch. It's great. We hung it at switch level, and we can trigger and/or dim the lights upon entering or leaving. So much easier than voice commands. At night, we detach the switch from the magnetic plate and leave it on a nightstand. I only wish we had purchased this earlier.

Set-up was super easy. Dependability has been perfect.

Top critical review

Critical reviews›

Eric Lake

Not the old version, product page just lying

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2023

This is not the old version of the product. The old version is better and actually the same height as regular switches rather than the new garbage ones. Why sellers get to just lie to people is beyond me. Amazon clearly doesn't give a crap and neither do the sellers. Immediately am returning this. Don't lie on your product page.

One person found this helpful

907 total ratings, 316 with reviews

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From the United States

bogart the consumer

Love the switch. Perfect accessory to Alexa-controlled Hue lights.

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2017

Verified Purchase

Helpful

Amazon Customer

I especially like that you can program the button to change the ...

Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2017

Verified Purchase

We have multiples of these in our house. It's helpful so we don't need to carry our phone around or others when visiting can turn the lights on and off. I especially like that you can program the button to change the scene up to 5 times when hit quickly in a row. Our living room displays blue colors for morning and night when we don't like bright lights but need the way lit but if we press it a few more times we get bright white light throughout the room, very convenient and easy to use/customize.

Helpful

Homekit News and Reviews

it’s fair to say I like these devices

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

With me already owning 4 of these and having just ordered another, it’s fair to say I like these devices. To be honest, unlike some people, I haven’t really gone all in with Hue ‘stuff’. I’m currently using a Hue Bridge (2nd gen) a Hue Go, a few Dimmer Switch and some basic Warm White Hue bulbs. These bulbs are in an area frequently used by mother-in-law, and as such I need her to be able to control the lights without using the original switches – which as you may know – disconnects the smart bulbs from Hue & HomeKit. Not much point in smart bulbs if they’re disconnected right?

So this is where these dimmer switches come in handy. They’re stylish enough to blend in to most places, and they’ve got just enough buttons to both please the techies, but also not too many for those that don’t really care! These switches hit that middle area perfectly for her, and now that the old light switches are disconnected, she knows to use these new ones, and she loves them (if it’s possible for an octogenarian to love something like this…).

Anyway, of those that don’t know, these aren’t exposed as HomeKit devices in and of themselves, much like Hue bulbs, so you do need the Hue Bridge in order for them to be exposed and appear in the Home app. Once they are, in the standard Home app, you can assign four different actions or scenes, one to each button. If you really want to get more out of them via HomeKit, then some 3rd party HomeKit apps will allow different actions/scenes to be associated with the different buttons at different times of day, so the amount of functions can be multiplied quite easily.

Why you can’t do in these 3rd HomeKit apps control things with short, long or multiple presses. These kind of things can really only be achieved in 3rd part Hue apps, probably the best one being iConnectHue. With this app, you can program each switch to do something with each successive press; so for example, press ON once, and it turns on the lights at 50%, press again and it brightens them to 100% and maybe a third press to set them to only 10%. You can even program successive long presses with various actions too, like turning on whole sets of lights. The tradeoff here is that these functions only work with Hue devices, not Homekit only products.

back to the switches themselves, they come with a faceplate that sticks to the wall with 3M built-in CommandStrips, or you can screw them into the wall if you think they’re going to stay in one permanent place. The button section also acts as a remote, so it can be taken off the plate and taken with you. I don’t personally do this as they can easily go missing, just like any remote control, but you have that option.

The four buttons are by default labelled as ON, OFF Brightness Up and Brightness DOWN, but as already mentioned, you can assign any type of action to these button – for example you could even use on of the middle buttons to turn on a fan or coffee machine!

at around £15-20 their priced quite competitively and so I definitely rate them as the best for overall quality, price and customisability.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Dan Monahan

Works great -- just make sure it's in WiFi range...

Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2018

Verified Purchase

This works exactly as advertised. It's easy to set up and once it's set up it keeps on working. The only trouble that I've had, and this isn't really the fault of the manufacturer, is that I have one switch in my basement floor, which is farthest away from my WiFi router -- once every 20 times I try to turn on/off the corresponding light using this switch, I get the error light -- this is most likely owing to poor connectivity back to the hub. That's OK, I just hit the button again and it works.

Helpful

Eric Lake

Not the old version, product page just lying

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2023

Verified Purchase

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Matt M

My favorite way to control my HomeKit system

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2018

Verified Purchase

I absolutely love these switches. I have them at the entrance to almost every room in my house, and one on each of our nightstands. I know that it's popular these days to use voice commands for everything, but sometimes I don't feel like talking to an assistant. Sometimes it's faster to just tap a button as you walk in a room. Sometimes you're climbing into bed late and don't want to wake up your wife. That's what these switches are for.

I don't use these switches as dimmers. I don't even use them for anything in the Hue app. These are purely for activating scenes in HomeKit through the Home app. In each room the top button activates the most-used (usually brightest) scene, the bottom turns everything off, and the ones in the middle are in-between brightness levels or alternate scenes.

I like these more than the Tap switches. I love that the Tap switches don't require batteries, but the sacrifice is that they're difficult to push. Clumsy, even. The dimmer switches are just a light tap on the button, and while their plastic construction could be tighter, it's less clumsy than the Tap.

The only reason I give this 4 stars instead of 5 is that they're annoying to set up in HomeKit. This might be Apple's deal but I'm not sure. Every time I added one of these switches, they would show up just fine in the Home app, and I could assign a scene to each button. Then, I could push the button and the app would even register that the button had been pushed...but nothing would happen. Not a single light would be controlled. Each time, I had to restart my Apple TV (my home hub) in order to get it working, but this was annoying and it took forever to figure out that first time.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

MichaelK

Versatile Light Switch for Phillips Hue Lights

Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2020

Verified Purchase

I thought this would only control one light and only turn it on or off. Wrong.
You can use the app and pick up to like 4 or 5 scenes for this remote to activate.
If you push the on button once, it turns on your first scene (colors).
Each time you push the ON button again, it goes to the next colorful scene you've selected.

Easy to use. With the back plate you can attach to a wall or something, or you can pop out the remote and just leave it on your side table with the other remotes. The backplate for mounting has sticky tabs to easily mount.

Phillips Hue products aren't cheap, but they have that "Apple" style and the "Apple" ease of use.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Work great after tweaking Hue bridge's standard configuration

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2016

Verified Purchase

These work great. I have bought a number of them for my house and they all do a great job.

Nevertheless something to keep in mind is that they interfere with old 2.4GHz wifi. I have a dual band wifi modem and some of the older devices only support 2.4Ghz wifi. For instance, these dimmer switches would work perfectly but suddenly stop responding while I was using my old PlayStation. To overcome this, I changed the wireless channel of my Hue bridge to 20 or 25 and lowered the wireless channel of my wifi router's 2.4GHz wifi to 6. No problems after that, dimmer switches are responsive 100% of the time.

If you're experiencing unresponsiveness you may want to try tweaking the settings.

14 people found this helpful

Helpful

Garrett G. Graham

An essential part of the smart light adventure

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2017

Verified Purchase

Controlling your lights from Alexa or on a schedule is great, but sometimes you need a good old fashion switch. I frequently find situations when speaking to turn on or off my lights is not convenient. When I get up early in the morning and my wife is still asleep, when I am talking on the phone or when I think of turning on a light just as I am walking by a switch. The switch is always faster and quieter then speaking. These Phillips Dimmer Switches also make installations anywhere you want very easy. The option to sit the remote next to you when watching a movie is great too. Setting them up in the Hue app is a piece of cake. The only thing that would make these perfect is to lower the price and slightly increase the size of the wall plate so it matches standard switches. Great job Phillips Hue please keep up the great work.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

ColoradoDogLover23

Exactly what I needed

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2017

Verified Purchase

I have been using Hue lights for a while now and always depended on my phone to turn my lights on. When I moved a couple years ago and set up my new apartment, I found I was constantly forgetting to turn my lights off or would walk into a dark room fumbling for my phone in my purse - only to find it was dead. I’m sure you can imagine someone running into walls and tables trying to find a light to turn on...

I’m not sure why I never knew about the dimmer switch, but wow, this has been amazing! I received it only a couple days ago, but it has made such a difference. I put the switch right next to the door and now I never leave the room with the lights still on and never have to fumble for my phone. I love the fact that you can put the switch anywhere, and that it also acts like a remote. Exactly what I was looking for!

2 people found this helpful

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