Philips hue how many bulbs

If you currently have a crowded hub with too many devices, you will need to move some of them to the new hub. As painful as it is re-configuring each bulb, it's less painful than the whole network crashing! You're ready to buy more hubs to get your whole house going with Hue - not so fast. Unfortunately, there are some downsides to using multiple hubs that you will need to deal with before everything will work smoothly. The biggest problem is that each device will be paired to a single hub, with no ability to communicate with any of the other ones.

This means that within the Hue ecosystem, you won't be able to control two lights that are connected to different hubs together.

In fact, as of writing, there is not even a way to control more than one hub at a time in the Hue app! To control lights on different hubs, you would need to reconfigure the app like you are using it for the first time every time you wanted to switch. As strange as it is, Hue doesn't seem to have much support for large configurations out of the box. All of the official software is limited to single hub control, with a clear separation between your different hubs, which they consider different homes.

There are many ways to work around this, but they all involve using a third-party solution. If you aren't too keen on that idea, consider using a different ecosystem to support more devices!

First, let's take a look at the easiest methods. Keep in mind that you will sometimes need to use a specific method as the others won't support your specific use case. Also, remember that as none of these are officially supported, they may stop working at a moments notice, requiring you to diagnose the problem yourself.

It likely won't be difficult to fix, but it's a far cry from the plug-and-play solution provided by Hue out of the box. While it may seem weird that other companies support multiple hubs better than Hue, both SmartThings and HomeKit include easy ways to get this done.

They support Hue hubs, mind you, not only their own. Both systems can have a near unlimited amount of bridge devices that make non-native smart products available, such as the Hue hub.

Jason Dave I have 52 so far. December 31st, Reply. Marc D Jason.. January 1st, Reply. Daniel Profitlich Hmm. Vinicius Watson I am kind of afraid of this now, only my kitchen and living room together already have 50 lights… I will have to check about getting another hub and how this works. February 20th, Reply. Lol December 7th, Reply. Greg Davis I have about 70 lights and have to use 2 bridges. December 7th, Reply. March 15th, Reply. September 16th, Reply.

All work well. December 12th, Reply. Geneva My mind is blown. August 11th, Reply. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Philips Hue Reviews. Philips Hue is a line of smart LED light bulbs and fixtures.

Each one communicates wirelessly with the Hue Bridge, a little modem-looking thing that you keep plugged into your home's router. That connection to the cloud lets you control Hue's lights from your phone, with a voice command via Siri, Alexa or the Google Assistant, or by automating them to turn on and off at specific times or when other devices trigger them.

Many of Philips Hue's bulbs and fixtures can change colors upon request hence the "Hue" branding , but some are just basic bulbs that put out plain ol' white light and nothing else. To get started with Philips Hue, you plug in the Hue Bridge and connect it to your router via an Ethernet cable. Then you'll screw in your Hue bulbs or turn on your Hue fixtures.

Download the Philips Hue app to your Android or iOS device and open it up -- it'll walk you through the rest of the setup process. Once you've paired your lights with the app, you sort them by room and give each one a unique name. The app and if you're using them, the Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant voice controls will let you control entire rooms at once by saying, for example, "turn on the living room.

The Hue app comes with a number of preset "scenes" that, when activated, will automatically change all of the lights in the room.

Along with basic scenes for normal, soft white and daylight-toned white light, there are multicolor scenes that will randomly apply colors from a preselected palette across all of a room's lights. For instance, a Spring Blossom-themed scene will randomly assign shades of pink, red and white across your lights, while a Northern Lights-themed scene will go live with shades of green and blue. You can make and save your own scenes in the Hue app, too, which lets you return to a custom mix of colors that you like with a single tap or voice command.

The Hue Bridge plugs into your router and sends Zigbee commands to your Hue lights. Unless you've got an Amazon Echo Plus, you can't use Hue bulbs and fixtures without it. Oh, right, I should probably be a little more specific. Zigbee is a wireless communication technology like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. You can think of it as a language that lets smart lights talk to each other and to their control hub.

All of Hue's bulbs and fixtures have their own built-in Zigbee radios, as does the Hue Bridge, which you keep plugged into your router. Its job is to act like a Zigbee-to-Wi-Fi translator for your home network and your lights.

For instance, you send a signal to your router whenever you turn a Hue bulb on using the app. From there, the Hue Bridge translates that command into a Zigbee signal and sends it out to the bulb.

All of this happens in a fraction of a second, and since the connection to your router keeps your Hue Bridge connected to the cloud, it means you can control your lights from anywhere in the world where your phone can connect to the internet. One quick note: You'll need the square-shaped, second-gen Hue Bridge pictured above for all of that. The circular, first-gen Hue Bridge is no longer supported.

Nope, you don't need a Zigbee provider or a Zigbee subscription or anything like that. Zigbee isn't like Wi-Fi in that sense. It's more like Bluetooth. It's a local wireless network for your home -- specifically for your smart home gadgets. Once you plug the Hue Bridge into your router, screw in a Hue bulb, and pair the two together via the Hue app, the two will start using Zigbee to communicate like two kids playing with walkie-talkies.

You don't have to sign up for Zigbee service or pay a monthly Zigbee bill or anything like that. Since Zigbee is a local network, none of Hue's bulbs connect directly to the cloud, and all of their Zigbee transmissions back and forth to each other and to the Hue Bridge follow standard encryption practices, which the Philips Hue team has been developing and refining with regular firmware updates for several years now. Speaking of the Hue Bridge, you have to connect it directly to your router with an Ethernet cable.

While that's a little less convenient than hubs that connect to the router wirelessly, the Hue team tells us that this approach ensures that your home's Wi-Fi credentials are never transmitted wirelessly, which would make it easier for someone to intercept them. Hue also requires you to tap the button on the top of Bridge during the initial pairing process and during setup for most third-party connections, which is an excellent common-sense means of keeping someone from taking over your system from outside of your home.

On top of that, each Hue Bridge has a unique verification key, which means that if one were to be compromised, the hacker couldn't use it as a way to take over any others.

Hopefully your Hue performance issues are resolved. If not, you may genuinely need to buy a second Bridge. Originally the first problem you would face here is that the Hue app only supported a single bridge — leading people to rely on third party apps like Hue Essentials. Thankfully this oversight was fixed in the revamped Hue app, which now finally allows proper multi-bridge support. This means that your smart lighting system — which you paid money for to make your life easier — is suddenly cumbersome and annoying to manage.

Thankfully there are a few solutions. As you can tell, there are quite a few options open to you if you have multiple Hue Bridges. I talk about different smart home hub options here , in-case this article has piqued your internet in smart hubs. Thanks for reading this article, I hope you found it useful. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel for all the latest smart home tips, tricks and updates.

Also be sure to check out the 13 smart home products that I most recommend to people. We are living in !!!