Belkin WeMo smart LED lighting allows us to control our home lighting from anywhere with our smartphone and Internet connection. The starter pack contains two light bulbs and one central unit called WeMo Link. One WeMo Link unit can control up to 50 light bulbs so your WiFi router does not need to handle 50 WiFi connections and will only need to deal with one Link unit instead.
The light bulbs are 60W equivalent warm white, rated for 3000K and 800 lumen brightness. Using the free WeMo app for iOS and Android, we can connect to our light bulbs from anywhere, turning them on or off, adjusting the dim level, grouping some bulbs to receive one instruction, schedule on/off time using precise time or based on sunset/sunrise time. Belkin WeMo works with IFTTT, allowing us to make tons of logic possibilities on our smart home.
The initial setting is straightforward in theory. All we need to do is install WeMo app in our phone; attach the light bulbs to standard sockets and turn on the switch; plug WeMo Link into power; then follow the instructions displayed in the app. Sounds easy, yet it took me 3 attempts to get it right. Somehow the connection stopped responding in my first 2 attempts. Waited an hour for no progress then decided to reset the whole thing again. The good news, once properly set up, we can unplug the Link unit and all light bulbs without losing the settings.
On first use, there’s a fair chance it will ask us to upgrade its firmware. This is another tricky part as I also experienced 2 failures in firmware download. The app doesn’t give us much useful feedback on the upgrade progress when things go wrong. I finally managed to get them working after few attempts though. No trick, just repeating the process and eventually it worked.
There are tons of other smart lighting products in the market and Belkin WeMo is probably not the most feature-rich. However, for times when I need to rely on my lights to be turned on at certain time (such as when travelling), I choose a brand I already know and trust instead of some unknown startup company.
Overall, once properly set up, this product works as expected. The initial set up process needs to be improved so they are more stable and would always work the first time though. Also they need to offer LED bulbs with cool white. I generally prefer cool while over warm white, but I just don’t have the choice with Belkin WeMo.
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