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Showing posts with the label smart home

Christmas Haul - C-Life Smart Bulbs With Google Home

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I've chronicled my experience with LIFX bulbs before here on the blog.  Here's my post from February of last year showing the bulb and how we were using it .  The LIFX bulbs are great.  They have tons of different colors, plenty of scheduling, integration with Nest and Google Home.  But they're pricey.  Still.  After being on the market for a number of years, they're still about $49.00 per bulb . These GE C-Life bulbs are cheaper.  Much cheaper.  If you can find them on sale, you can get a pair of them for $15.  $7.50 per bulb is very affordable.  But with that lower cost comes some trade-offs.   First, there's no color.  They're just normal light bulbs.  Second, it appears that they're running off bluetooth, so they have to be *close* to a Google Home.  Welp, for us, that's not a problem, because we have these Google Homes, Google Home Minis and Google Home what-have-yous in various places around our house. Here's the bulb below.  Looks lik

Hey Google: Turn off the Lights in the Family Room

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I've just about gotten to the end of my "Christmas Haul" posts here on the blog with this light bulb post.  Most recently, I - hopefully - convinced those of you who are reading that I'm NOT just a bird-crazy person and that all I wanted was bird stuff .  I sure did get a lot from Nat and the kids, but I also scored a few other things from my brother-in-law ( the Sortimo T-Boxx from that I recently posted ), my father-in-law ( the Craftsman Multimeter that I posted last week ) that are both destined for my basement shop.  Or...as the naming convention around here insists:  my #NewOldWorkshop .  Nat's Mom and Dad gave me this LIFX bulb that is one of a handful of smart bulbs that work directly with our Google Home and don't require a Smarthome bridge/hub.  That has a lot of appeal to me.  You can find the details of Google Assistant/Home + LIFX here on the LIFX landing page specifically for Google Home .   They show you a bunch of the commands.    I