What happens if my Philips Hue lights turn off?

Installing Philips Hue bulbs is a great way to improve your lighting game, but since they rely heavily on an internet connection, you might be wary of going all in and covering your home with smart lights. The good news is there’s nothing to worry about — here’s what happens when your Philips Hue lights turn off.

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If your internet goes down

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Since smart lights use an internet connection for many of their features to work, you might think that they become completely useless when your internet goes down. However, when this happens, you only lose a little bit of functionality.

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If your Philips Hue lamps lose their internet connection, you will only lose the ability to control them from your smartphone when you are away from home. As long as the Hue Bridge is connected to your wireless router and your phone is connected to your home Wi-Fi network, you will still be able to control the backlight from your phone even if your internet connection is down.

What’s more, as long as the hub is enabled, your Hue dimmer switches will work as normal, even if you’ve configured those switches in a third-party app like iConnectHue.

If the power goes out

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As you can probably guess, if the power goes out in your house or apartment, your Philips Hue lights will go out with it. At this point, a smart light bulb is no more or less useful than a regular light bulb—eventually, regular light bulbs will go out too.

However, when you turn the power back on, all of your Hue lights will turn back on, regardless of whether they were turned off at the time of the power outage. They will also revert to the default soft white color temperature, regardless of the color state they were in when the power was turned off.

This means that if the power goes off and on again in the middle of the night, expect to be woken up by the lighting lights of your shade. Unfortunately, there’s no way to prevent this, but luckily your power doesn’t fade all that often anyway.

If Hub Bridge Completely Fails

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It’s rare that the Hue Bridge is completely screwed up, but there’s always the possibility. When this happens, your Hue bulbs basically turn into traditional (albeit expensive) bulbs.

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Your next step is to just buy a new hub to replace the broken one, but you can still use the Hue lights without a hub if you have a Hue Dimmer Switch (you might just have to pair them with a dimmer switch). Of course, you won’t be able to change colors, switch to different scenes, or control them with Alexa, but you can at least turn your Hue lights on and off and even dim them to certain levels without the need for a hub.

Of course, even this isn’t really any different than a normal light switch, but you can at least bring a Hue dimmer with you around the house and mount it anywhere since it doesn’t need to be plugged into the wall.

After all, your Hue lights aren’t completely useless if your internet goes down or even if your Hue Bridge goes completely cappy, but as with any SmartHome device, there are some things to keep in mind if things go wrong. wrong with your Philips Hue system.