“No more power cuts waking you up at night” because all your Hue lights turned on at max brightness. That’s the promise made by George Yianni (Founder and Head of Technology at Philips Hue) at the recent IFA electronics industry conference.

What George is talking about is a flaw in all Philips Hue lights (bulbs, strips, lamps etc) that has had owners frustrated for many years. The flaw is caused by the currently default fixed behaviour of Hue lights, which all turn onto maximum brightness yellowish white after a power cut.

Hue lights are always on at the powerpoint drawing a small amount of power so they can respond to voice commands. This has meant that owners of these lights cannot connect them up to a mechanical timer or power board with master switch to turn them on and off because the lights don’t “remember” the last colour and brightness level they had before they were turned off.

If you try doing this when you turn the power board master switch back on all Hue lights attached to it will blast your eyeballs with hundred percent brightness. You might say that this isn’t really a big flaw and people should stop complaining.

However consider that unless you turn all your Hue lights off before going on a holiday, which is particularly hard to do if they’re screwed into ceiling light sockets around your house, if a power cut occurs just after you leave home for the airport, all your Hue lights will be on using up lots of electricity until you return home days or weeks later.

This is exactly what happened to Hue user AndreTheGeek and hundreds of other Hue owners since the lights were first launched years ago.

We checked with Philips to find out more about George Yianni’s promised update and found out that only Hue light owners who are controlling their lights via a Philips Hue Bridge will get this update to be able to control brightness and colour after power off.

Hue light owners using a Zigbee hub like the Amazon Echo Plus won’t get the update because Philips only enables basic Hue functions via Zigbee control, which excludes light firmware updates.

So if you have Philips Hue lights with the bridge keep an eye out for the update to stop your lights blinding you in the middle of the night and if you don’t have a bridge and this is an issue for you maybe think about purchasing a bridge.

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Andrew

I use the much cheaper Yeelights and they’ve had this feature for years and also don’t require any hub, just plugs straight into your WiFi.