We have two decorative figures at home that we would “upgrade” with some colors. Until now we only had a smart plug to turn them on / off, but we wanted something more. We found some light bulbs from WiZ that could do this at a reasonable price.
WiZ has smart house equipment of several types. The difference between these devices and other devices that we have at home is how they communicate. Since most devices in our home use either Zigbee or Z-wave, WiZ communicates over IP.
You do not need your own HUB, as everything runs on WiZ’s own cloud platform. However, it is also possible to communicate directly with the devices without going through the cloud. Among other things, the wiz_light plugin for Home Assistant provides this solution.
We tried two WiZ E14 light bulbs to see how this works.
The setup was very simple and straight forward.
- Download the Wiz app on your mobile phone
- Connect the light bulb
- Turn it on and off 4 times
- The app then finds the light bulb and connects it to your wireless network
In the app you can now control everything about how the lights should behave. Brightness, color, automation etc. So completely normal smart home control of lights.
But we wanted more. We like to control the lights via our smart home, and then without using WiZ’s cloud solution. Then we can use it with other automations that we already use.
Therefore we installed wiz_light plugin to connect them to our smart house. After following the instructions on the installation, it was very easy to connect a new light bulb.
To set up the bulb in Home Assistant, just go to Configuration -> Integrations -> Add intetration, select Wiz light and enter the IP address that the light bulb has received. You can find this on your router, among other places. Recommend to set a fixed IP on the bulbs, so you will not have trouble with this in the future. (We have not tried hostname).
Also enter the name of the bulb so you can recognize it afterwards.
When this is done, you can control the light like any other light via Home Assistant and use the light in all automation you might have.
Note – if you have multiple bulbs, installing one by one could take some time. But it looks like the creator of the plugin is working on a solution for this in the next release.
You ever see a way to assign a static ip to these bulbs? Im using a netgear router and no luck.
I’m using a TP-Link Deco X60, and there I can reserve an IP for the bulb. I have never used Netgear so I’m not sure. But I can see you need to add the MAC address for the bulb when you reserve it. You can find the MAC address under “Device” in Home Assistant (or in the Wiz app)