Home décor can be stressful. Getting the right look for different rooms is a considered task with each room, from the toilet to the kitchen to the kids’ bedrooms, needing a lot of thinking about to put your own, or your children’s own, stamp on it. But one thing that every room does need is lighting.
Who mentioned lighting? Have you seen the plethora of lightning options available in the shops and online? It’s a minefield – desk lamps, standing lamps, wall lights, ceiling lights, cabinet lights, picture lights, security lights, emergency lights, smart lights and lots more in various shapes, designs and sizes.
When it comes to accessorising your rooms with lighting there are plenty of excellent options out there from the simple but functional to the cool and unique. And we’ve been lucky enough to have been asked to try out one very unique and cool bit of lighting tech indeed that can be used in any room in the house!
The LIFX Lightstrip Starter Kit is an app-controlled Wi-Fi Smart LED Light Strip in full colour-changing zones that is compatible with Alexa, Hey Google, HomeKit and Siri. It certainly gives any room a unique quirky look. Everything you need to get started is in the box with no need for a hub or any extra hardware. These strip lights and extendable and flexible (up to 10 metres), allowing you to accessorise almost any space, from staircases to bed frames, cabinets, desks and doorframes, with colour changing, zoned LED lights.
Contained in the box is:
- Power adapter
- Control unit with 2.5m of lead
- 2 x 1m LIFX Strip Lights
- Instructions
The LIFX lightstrips are like a flat-bottomed, sticky-backed tape with LED lights and a rubberised, domed top. This allows the lights to be stuck to the wall, window frames, door frame or furniture and can even be cut to size. The starter kit is supplied with two 1 metre strips but you can add up to eight more strips to extend the length to 10 metres to be operated from one control unit.
We were going to use them in one of the children’s bedrooms, she wanted them around her door frame, but because they are mounted via a sticky-back, we chose to get them setup first before placing them around the doorframe. We only fully stuck them down once we were sure they worked and that was definitely where she wanted them once they were all lit up.
Setting them up was really easy and took no time at all. The app is required to set the lights up, so we downloaded the LIFX app (available from the App Store and Play Store) to a compatible phone. Once we downloaded the app we unpacked the components from the box and followed the easy to understand instructions.
The lightstrips are 1 metre in length, each with connectors at the ends – male at one end and female at the other. The lights are plugged first into the power adaptor, then into each other until you have all of your lights in a strip (there are just the two strips in the starter kit, but you can have up to 10 if you want).
Once we had connected the two lightstrips and powered them on, the lights immediately lit up in really bright brilliant white. Then we opened the app on and connected the app to the lights – part of this process is either setting up a new LIFX account or logging into your existing one and it allows you to control all of you LIFX products from one place which is great – this allows you to use your phone as a universal remote to control them.
The lightstrips in brilliant white would be particularly good for lighting under a kitchen worktop, desk or work area but that wouldn’t use one percent of the capabilities of these lights! Because as well as ultra-bright white lights, you can also use the app at easily alter the warmth and brightness level of the white lights so you can create subtle lighting for the evening and create just the right mood and ambience. And the adaptability doesn’t end there.
As well as the white lights, the LEDs on the lightstrips have an almost infinite number of different coloured lights that can also be adjusted for warmth and intensity. Each strip has 8 addressable colour zones, which means that you can get the colour effects that you want just right. You can either set your own ‘scene’, which means you can input the exact colour specification that you want, choose one of the pre-set scenes (we particularly loved the Pastel and Peaceful). Or, if you really want to harness the power of these fantastic lights, have a look at some of the effects!
The effects are fantastic fun, especially in a teenager’s bedroom. You can create moving effects, colour cycles or candle flickers, and even get the lights to move to the music that your phone is playing! What teenager wouldn’t be impressed with that? We have a Spotify subscription so have an almost limitless library of music but it’ll work just as well with music you have downloaded to your phone or even music streamed from YouTube. The lights really do move to the music and the kids think it’s quite possibly the coolest thing they have ever seen. The effects are fantastic, and she can’t wait to get them up and running in her bedroom!
In that isn’t enough, the app also features a Schedule function, which is one of the most useful things that the lights can do. You can set a schedule, either as a one off, by day or by weekday / weekend day so that the lights will come on and change colour or brightness according to your wishes. This allows to set some really cool options such as setting it to slowly wake you up with gradually increasing light in the morning, or even use it as a night light for younger children during the night.
The sticky strip lends itself really well to being stuck around a door frame, on skirting boards, behind a desk, under a counter or worktop or even behind the television giving you a variety of really useful options. It would be great to use as a low-level light for lighting the way to the bathroom for the kids in the night, or even as a security feature for when you’re away from home or backlighting a mirror or the television.
And whilst everyone loves an app, especially one to control your lights with some really cool effects, you can also voice control them if you integrate with your Alexa, Hey Google, Home Kit or Siri. We have added it Alexa and its great just being able to tell her to turn on / off lights etc. without having to pick up the phone and use the app.
We have had some great fun testing out the LIFX Lightstrip Starter Kit – we think it’s a fantastic product and has a variety of uses in different rooms of the house. The quality and brightness of the colour of these lights is fabulous, and the adaptability and depth of colour really does have to be seen to be believed.
There lights are absolutely brilliant, and we are over the moon with them. We cannot fault them in any way – they are simple to set up and use, are great quality, great fun and add a real sense of individuality and quirkiness to a space.
Rating: 5/5
RRP: £79.99
Available to buy from Amazon here.
