Review: Lidl Smart Home – Mood Light, Garden Light, Door Bell and more

At the beginning of December we started working on the Lidl Smart Home starter package and Christmas lights. The supermarket chain released its own smarthome collection based on Tuya. This time, however, not a WiFi protocol, but the Zigbee protocol. Lidl is also compatible with Philips Hue and IKEA Tradfri. The supermarket chain is going ahead, as a second series of new products has now been launched. In this review we will get started with nine new products.

What is it?

Lidl has significantly expanded the smart home collection with new fixtures, smart lamps and a smart doorbell under the brand name Smart Home Livarno Lux. We started working with the following products:

• Smart Led Light Bar – 29.99 euros
• Smart Led Mood Light – 34.99 euros
• Smart Led Garden Light – 39 euros
• Smart Led Wall Light – 39.99 euros
• Smart Led Light Strip – 29.99 euros
• Smart Wireless Door Bell – 19.99 euros
• Smart Color-Change LED Light Bulb GU10 – 9.99 euros
• Smart Color-Change LED Light Bulb E14 – 9.99 euros
• Smart Lighting Starter Kit with Color E27 Bulbs – 49.99 euros

Lidl products can sometimes be found in stores, but always via the Online store of the supermarket chain.

Starter set and smart lamps

We have the starter kit in our previous review Discussed extensively, but with the Zigbee hub it forms the basis of Lidl Smart Home. It consists of the gateway (ZigBee), a remote control and three color lamps with large fitting (E27). So you always need a ZigBee hub for Lidl products, but that can also be a ZigBee hub from another brand. For 49.99 it is a great start to take your first steps in a smart home. The whites of the lamps are excellent, but the colors are disappointing. Not only are the colors duller than the competitors’ lamps, the light output is actually below par. We also see the same in the other smart lamps with small fitting (E14) and the spotlight (GU10). It is therefore a consideration that you have to make when you choose the smart lamps from Lidl Smart Home. Do you opt for the better color lamps from Action, Kruidvat or HEMA and are you satisfied with the WiFi protocol? Or do you choose Lidl, are you satisfied with less good color lamps, but do you have the basics in house with ZigBee to expand further with brands such as Philips Hue or IKEA Tradfri?

Light Bar and Mood Light

The Smart Led Light Bar is very similar to the Philips Hue Play light bars, albeit in a cheaper package. This light bar can show different shades of white and also color. You plug the light bar into the socket, set the switch on the cord to on and select this light bar in the Lidl Smart Home app. Installation is a piece of cake. With white light, the light output is still reasonably bright with 530 lumens, but the colors are significantly less bright and emit hardly any light. The light bar is made of cheap white plastic, which does not enhance the atmosphere very much. If you place this light bar out of sight, you will not be bothered by it. It is a great lamp with a cheap price, but you would rather not have this model in sight.

The Mood Light doesn’t do much differently than the Light Bar, but it has a much better look. Made of clear plastic, this lamp does exactly what its name says. You set all the colors of the rainbow to indicate your mood (and where it can be raised). The white tones are good and easy to adjust from cold light to warm light. Here too, color is again significantly less bright, but because the housing is much nicer than with the Light Bar, you just put this Mood Light in sight. The light output of the colors with the Mood Light is also just a bit higher than with the light bar. The white light is less bright. The maximum light output is 400 lumens and the Mood Light should last for 30,000 burning hours. It is a cheap alternative to the Philips Hue Bloom or Philips Hue Iris table lamps and well worth your money.

The great thing about both lamps is that you can also easily set them up in Philips Hue. Plug them in, open the Philips Hue app and search for new additions. Adding is a piece of cake and also works faster than adding to the Lidl app. So if you already have a Zigbee bridge / hub from Philips Hue or another brand, then you do not have to purchase the starter package with the gateway from Lidl.

Garden Light and Wall Light

The Garden Light is one of the better products from this new series. For 39 euros you can get the Lidl version of the Philips Hue Outdoor Lily at home. It is a spotlight for your garden that can display both shades of white and color. The whole comes with a long and sturdy cord with plug for the socket, an adapter and various accessories. You can easily poke the Garden Light in a bed or in the grass, but you can also hang the spot if desired. The housing is very sturdy and can take a beating and is ip65 certified, which means it should normally be able to withstand the Dutch weather conditions well. The white light is really a spot that still manages to give off quite a lot of light in the dark (420 lumens, 25,000 burning hours). Color is again much less bright, but can provide the garden with the right atmosphere. Installation is again a piece of cake and can be done with the Lidl Smart Home app, but also quickly in the Philips Hue app. The Garden Light is one of the best products in the new Lidl collection.

The Wall Light is an outdoor lamp for on the wall. You must therefore connect this model wired. However, the housing is a lot less sturdy than the Garden Light. You don’t see it from a distance, but up close we are really dealing with a plastic whole. Nevertheless, the design is certainly not bad with the three black discs and the white tube. It exudes a certain tranquility and class, until you take a closer look at the materials. The Wall Light has an ip44 certificate (splash-proof), so preferably hang this lamp under a roof. The light output is 570 lumens (white light) and the lamp must be able to burn for 25,000 hours. This is enough to illuminate a large part of the driveway or garden. In addition, the lamp can also display colors, but here too the light output plunges far down. A further disadvantage is that the lamp is indicated by default in Czech in the app after adding it, but you can change the name manually.

Light Strip

Lidl has also released an LED strip in the new collection. The LED strip has a length of two meters and can display shades of white and sixteen million colors. With a long LED strip, we often see that the light decreases as you follow the length of the LED strip. That is not the case with this LED strip from Lidl. At first glance you don’t see any difference with the beginning and the end of the comic. You can also add this model in the Lidl Smart Home app and in the Philips Hue app. There is not much to criticize about the LED strip. It is an LED strip as an LED strip should be. Thanks to the 3m adhesive strip you can easily attach the strip and there is also a connecting piece to connect two LED strips together. For an amount of 29.99 euros, it is a cheaper alternative than the LED strips from other brands.

Smart Wireless Door Bell

The Smart Wireless Door Bell is a smart doorbell. Mind you, a smart doorbell, not a smart video doorbell. You press the button and receive a notification on your phone. That is it. There is no camera, no microphone and no chime, so if someone presses the doorbell, you should just hear the short notification sound on your phone. The smart doorbell is a small round device with a push button that can also serve as a smart button, or so was my reasoning. In the Lidl Smart Home app I dug into the automations and smart rules to see if I could perhaps use the Smart Wireless Door Bell in combination with another product, for example as a remote control to switch on lights or switch off another action feed. Unfortunately this is not possible, because the doorbell does not appear in the list of automations.

Are you really going to use this as a doorbell? I do not think so. You will miss your visitors almost every time. And thanks to the lack of further integration with other Lidl Smart Home products, you cannot do anything with it. It’s nice for five minutes to annoy the other users of the Lidl Smart Home app in your household by continuously pressing the doorbell, so that they receive a notification, but that’s about it. What also does not help is that the notification itself is not in Dutch. The notification says: ‘Upozorneni na zvonek’, which is Czech for ‘Alert on the bell’. Well…

The good, the bad and the ugly

The new Lidl Smart Home collection is a mix of top products, pretty nice products and a big miss. The Mood Light and the Garden Light are the real toppers. They are very affordable, have an excellent design, give off good white tones and are an asset to any smart home. The colors are slightly less, but unfortunately that seems to be the standard at Lidl Smart Home. Compare the color light output of the Mood Light with the colors of the Philips Hue Iris and it is a world of difference. In the previous review, the colors of the E27 lamps were also less effective than with other brands. On the other hand, how often do you use the color lamps in the house? In any case, hardly me, but perhaps that is a different story for you. And supporting the Zigbee protocol makes up for a lot, with which you can not only expand your Lidl Smart Home collection with Philips Hue or IKEA Tradfri, but also expand your Philips Hue or IKEA collection with cheaper lamps from Lidl. It all works together and that is a big advantage. The LED strip is also excellent and the expansion of the smart lamps with GU10 and E14 fittings ensures that you can also replace other lamps in your house with smart lamps from Lidl.

I am slightly less enthusiastic about the Light Bar, not so much because of the lighting itself, but because of the design of the housing, which is made of cheap white plastic. The same problem also applies to the Wall Light. It is a great lamp, but up close the housing is made of very cheap materials. Finally, we have the Smart Wireless Door Bell. For 20 euros still quite solid on the price and the only thing it does is send a notification to your smartphone. Do you want a smart doorbell? Then take a look at a video doorbell that informs you with all kinds of bells and whistles, because you are bound to miss your visitor with this Lidl doorbell.

Lidl Smart Home app

The Lidl Smart Home app is a real Tuya app. The interface is almost identical to that of the Action, Kruidvat and HEMA. The basis is the Tuya Smart Life app itself and there is very little wrong with that. It is a well-arranged app where you can also set your smart rules and automations yourself. These do require some patience, as the If This Then That principle does require some trial and error. All lamps in this collection also work with your other ZigBee products such as those from Philips Hue or IKEA Tradfri. And if you use the Tuya app instead of the Lidl app, you can also use the WiFi products from Action, Kruidvat and HEMA interchangeably with Lidl’s ZigBee products. It does not matter which app you use. You can go in any direction. A number of products also support Google Assistant. As always applies here, check the box of the product to see if there is support for Google Assistant, because it differs per product.

Lidl Smart Home – Conclusion

Lidl has released a nice new collection of smart home products. The Mood Light and the Garden Light in particular are real additions to your smart home. Besides the Smart Wireless Door Bell, there are no bad products in the new collection. It is affordable, works with various apps and the wide collection offers something for everyone. The design is not the same for every product, but tastes can differ. And in addition, it really seems to be a Lidl thing, because the colors are always much less bright and clear than the white tones. A difference is always noticeable, also with other brands, but here it stands out. Yet the positive feeling dominates with this collection. You can safely go shopping at Lidl for cheap garden lighting or a Mood Light, because you will not easily find this quality for this price anywhere else.