Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsTerrible Product - Don’t waste your time
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2024
A few years ago I bought two of the non-matter Nanoleaf A19 bulbs. They worked so well and had nearly instant responses from the HomeKit app. At the time I was using around 20 Hue A19 soft white bulbs and slowly over the last few years I’ve been having my Hue bulbs burn out. I wasn’t replacing them and got to the point I needed to do something. So I ordered 16 Nanoleaf “Matter” bulbs thinking I’d have great performance like my “HomeKit” versions and also color bulbs rather than soft white that I had with Hue.
I have had nothing but issues since installing. I have never experienced such terrible smart home products. I have tried connecting via Nanoleaf app, HomeKit app, turning off cloud sync, factory refreshing, moving bulbs around to different locations, nothing has worked. If I create a scene in HomeKit, the bulbs randomly change brightness color and almost change in a “choppy” non smooth fashion. Hue bulbs and normal “dumb” dimmers typically have a smooth dimming feature, not these bulbs. They will take multiple steps to dim to where I set it to - might be that I go from 100% down to 20% and the bulbs will suddenly jump to 80 - 60 - 20 or something like that, not in sync, all random and very choppy. I’ve got grouped accessories (3 bulbs per fixture) and each bulb in the group changes independently of the others. Occasionally some change to different colors during the dimming/off/on procedure. There is no explanation to this. I hesitate to make any changes in HomeKit and if there is a scene set I typically need to run it multiple times before it sets correctly.
Lastly I had at least one bulb that would visibly “glow” after showing as off in HomeKit or Nanoleaf apps. I tried factory resetting and moving this bulb and no changes. There could have been more that did this, it was just the one bulb that was in a fixture right above my bed, so every night I could see it glowing in a dark room. Nanoleaf didn’t seem to care about this even after a video and picture. It has a visible glow in a dark room and getting video and picture of this is difficult but even in my evidence it showed a glowing orb in a fixture of 3 bulbs.
I have sent numerous emails to Nanoleaf, spent hours and hours troubleshooting, and there is no solution from them. They tried claiming their engineers were working on a solution which I had no idea was even released because even after it released the bulbs still didn’t work right. Nanoleaf support has run me around in circles, having new people respond to me and act like my ticket didn’t have enough reported data already and they’d ask me to do the standard troubleshooting actions every time I responded or send another list, screenshot, video, etc. The lack of care in the problem was astounding and their support was unwilling to provide help beyond copy/paste support replies.
I don’t know how some of you are enjoying these bulbs. I bought 16 of them and not a single one performed like any other smart bulb I’ve ever tried. They were so bizarre in how they were acting it couldn’t have been just a bad batch, these are terribly engineered. Maybe it’s related to HomeKit and Matter and them not working - but save you money and go to Hue for consistency and an actual good product. Maybe if Nanoleaf decides to go back to their old design I’d be interested again, but these matter bulbs are 100% junk!
