Rako vs Lightwave vs Philips Hue

Harkon321

I’ve currently got Philips Hue through the majority of the house,  close to the limit on one hue bridge.

We’ve submitted plans for a new kitchen, diner, living room extension and a small home cinema.

Due to the fact there will be wiring and plastering going on, should I be considering other lighting solutions. I’m concerned that the strip lights in the kitchen and cinema will be ridiculously expensive if I just use Hue products.

What should I be considering?  What are benefits or constraints of these systems?  What did you choose and why?

mushii

Lots of choice for smart lighting and again it runs from  £40-£50 per circuit to £300  per circuit.
Additional costs will include, controllers and interface packs.
Top end you are looking at Crestron or AMX, middle ground Lutron, C-Bus, Rako and at the budget end ZWave or Zigbee based solutions. Other solutions are available. Bare in mind that high end are not DIY install and will require hiring a dedicated programmer for the system at £500  per day as well as an approved or certified installer who may charge similar. Middle ground products of ten come in 2 flavours; wireless for retrofit or wired for new installs. The wired often have din-rail mounted lighting packs that require some form of low voltage wiring back to the switch. Not always easy to remove and replace if you are looking to move. Then there is the pure wireless bottom end of the market, using Zigbee (Hue, GE, ikea Tradfrii) or ZWave, which are often retrofittable, use a wireless protocol and rely on some sort of bridge or controller.
Then there are the ‘burn your house down’ products, such as Sonoff which are cheap Chinese made Wi-fi products carrying fake CE marks (Chinese Export) which are popular because they are very cheap (because they didn’t have the expense of testing and verification) and have dubious reliability from failing after a few months to actually catching fire.
The more expensive products will ‘just work’ but will not allow you to tinker. The cheaper products will allow you to configure as you want, but will require some ‘maintenance’ especially when new firmwares come out for their products or third party products that they interface with, such as controllers.