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You’ve got your new 4K TV, your sound bar and comfy seating. Is your TV room missing anything to really make movie night or even Tuesday night TV watching special? How about ambient light?
Ambient light not only adds a cool and colourful new dimension to your space, but it is also said to help ease eye strain if you’re going to be watching the television of gaming for extended periods. One product you can add to your TV, or really anywhere in the house is the flexible LIFX Z colour changing LED light strips.
LIFX lights are unique in that they don’t use a hub, like other smart lights do. These essentially have tiny Wi-Fi hubs built in so you can get them connected and control them with your smartphone or device. With an adhesive backing, you can install them anywhere in minutes. Plus, since they don’t need special wiring or installation (they use AC plugs) they can be placed almost anywhere.
LIFX Z versus LIFX Z TV?
It’s worth noting there are two versions of LIFX Z: the LIFX Z TV and LIFX Z starter Kit. The difference appears to be in their lengths: The Z LED Strip has 6.6’ of light strip for $129CAD while the LIFX Z “TV” kit has only 3.3 feet of lighting and costs a bit less naturally. ($99) The TV strip is meant only to lay across the top of the TV. **Can it be trimmed?
Also worth noting that the plug for these lights is huge, and might be a concern for your wall mounted set up.
Where to use LIFX Z
Smart LED light strips like the ones we’ll introduce you to here are controlled via your smartphone using a free app from the manufacturer. Each one is a bit different but by and large you can adjust the colour of the light, brightness, and set daytime or nighttime timers so it will turn on or off automatically. Some apps also allow special effects like rainbow colour morphing, or even adjusting to movies on your TV or flashing to music.
There’s a lot of great uses for this kind of flexible, flat LED lighting; you can use a product like the LIFX Z TV behind the TV to create bias or ambient lighting. You can use regular LIFX Z under cabinets or furniture for a unique look. You can add it to windows, or mantels, headboards, you name it.
Full confession: I’ve used LIFX lights before over the years. I’ve tried them out, gotten frustrated and removed them only to try them out again. While they’ve been pretty good in my experience and have certainly lived up to the colouful app controlled lights I’ve been looking for, I have previously found them to be finicky to set up and somewhat buggy to use and get integrated with other services. I also find they crap out completely after about a year or so of use and just stop connecting. I’d say about two of the seven light I have have have ended up in the garbage when they stopped functioning.
You can check out my previous reviews of LIFX ??? here. With that said, I’ve been looking forward to trying them again, since I’m always willing to give a gadget a second or third chance.
Now these lights, unlike some others you may be looking at, do not have the ability to change with the picture. These are what’s called bias or ambient light, designed to illuminate the area around the TV to reduce eye strain associated with watching a bright TV in a very dark room.
You can animate them to some extent using the Effects tab in the LIFX app and using the controls for each individual light. You can have the lights cycle different colours, they can flicker and flash too.
Setting up LIFX Z light strips
You install the lights by peeling off the adhesive back and sticking them to the back of your TV. Unlike some other light strips you can’t trim these to size.
To get them set up you’ll first need to create or log in to your LIFX account. Once in, make sure the lights are on, then select the “+” sign in the top right corner of the app and choose “Connect Light”. The app will search for bulbs and they should appear in your list.
After my issues with the bulbs, surprisingly the LIFX Z light was spotted by the app on the very first try. I plugged it in, opened the app and searched for new lights and there it was. It asked me to confirm the existing Wi-Fi connection without me needing to sign in again. Then I was able to scan the Apple HomeKit code and add it to HomeKit so it can be controlled with Siri.
When I went back to the app there was a slight delay before the light actually showed up. But eventually it did. And I was able to go into it and rename it. As part of the renaming process, I was able to immediately have it linked up to Google home. This all happened virtually automatically and seems to work just fine, so I was very impressed this time around.
The Google home connectivity appeared to work flawlessly. There was no reconnecting, no insuring connections, everything just worked. I was very impressed
