With smart home products quietly making their way into many homes, it’s not uncommon these days to see smart bulbs turn on in lamps and ceilings. But it can get expensive when you start sprucing up your interior design plans with some decorative smart lights like strips and wall panels.
The Wiz Luminaire Pole Floor Light is a great option if you want to add an app-controlled glow to a corner of your home, offering customizable light settings on a relatively tight budget from a trusted brand . Its standing pole design is attractive, but setting it up in some configurations can be a pain. The result is almost worth the hassle though.
WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light: Price and availability
The WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light is available now, priced at $119.99 / £119.99. That’s a fair price for what’s on offer here, and although smart, app-controlled floor lights can be found slightly cheaper from other brands, they don’t have the same solid reputation. that WiZ has, as it is part of the same Signify lighting group that is also responsible for Philips Hue.
WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light: What’s good?
The WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light is great if you want to quickly jazz up a corner of your home with controllable, colored lighting. It syncs over Wi-Fi with an app (or a smart home voice assistant like Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa), and can stand upright on a provided base, or can be placed horizontally on a surface. A recessed on-off button sits on top, if you want that physical touch in a voice-and-app commanded world.
Its design is simple — it features a dual-zone LED RGB lighting setup that can be set to millions of different colors, with the light housed in a white, almost cylindrical plastic casing, attached to a circular which is a white plastic base stand. An optional extension piece raises the total height from 112cm / 44.2 inches to 150cm / 59 inches, and the base itself is also optional (power cord directly to the light strip), meaning you can place it horizontally on a place if that suits your setup the better. So, as well as a corner lamp, it can act as bias lighting for a TV, or to add light over a bookshelf, for example. It’s light enough to put up high with relative safety, too.
That plastic wrap on the back is matte instead of transparent, and that’s great for digging up the light where you want it most. So for example, you can place it next to your television, but rotate it slightly so that the LEDs only hit the wall, rather than directly towards you and interrupting your viewing session.
It can be very bright with a maximum lumen output of 1080, but not enough to light up a room by itself. Place it in a reading corner and it will lighten your pages even more. With a quoted lamp life of 25,000 hours, you should get many years of use out of it too. However, remember that there is no easy way to open the lamp to replace anything if something goes wrong.
The WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light pairs with an iOS and Android app over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Offering a deep amount of customization settings (although the app’s presentation is a bit utilitarian) it lets you do everything from adding the Wiz Pole Floor Light to bedroom scenes, syncing it to automated multi-device commands, as well as simple settings like changing its colors and brightness, adding it to wake cycles, and even changing the speed at which it rotates through set colors.
It looks great in action, and the built in preset brightness settings, consisting of millions of possible color combinations, is a great gift. ‘Fireplace’ is a personal favourite, with two zones that alternate between warm yellow, red and orange, to provide a cozy glow. But it is equally easy to set the lamp to a cool white for aiding concentration too. Custom shades configurations can be saved in the app for quick and easy access, and I haven’t had a single connectivity issue with the WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light after several weeks of using it.
WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light: What’s not so good?
Although it’s fairly simple to set up the WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light in its default configuration, which sees the light strip clip onto a circular base, and a power cable drawn to it in a socket on the base of the lighting unit , the package also includes a plastic extender that raises the base of the light a few inches higher off the ground. This raises the overall height from 112cm / 44.2 inches to 150cm / 59 inches.
I liked the idea of ​​using it, as it would have matched the brightness of where my TV sat on its AV stand, but using it proved to be a nightmare. I just can’t thread the power cable up to the base, through the extension unit, and then into the light without an element falling off, or the cable coming off. After an hour of trying to use it, I gave up and settled on setting the light to a lower height, which was easy in comparison.
For those who have succeeded in feeding it through, it’s worth noting you have about seven feet of power cable to play with, including the extension. That’s a reasonable length, but may prevent some bolder placements, and will need to keep the light within that range. But if you use the included base plate, the built-in cable management is too shallow to reliably hold the cable in place, and when the cable has to run under and through the base plate, it can sometimes get stuck. out of the cabling gully, leaving the lamp resting on the cable unstable.
It’s also disappointing that, despite the many customization options within the app, you can’t manually set two different colors for the Pole Floor Light’s two different lighting regions. The presets show that this is possible, but it’s a feature locked to them, so it’s a shame that the extra layer of control isn’t given to users, too. If combining multiple shades is your thing, competing similar lamps offer many more color segments to tweak as well, rather than just the two zones.
It’s also worth noting that while the WiZ Pole Floor Light supports Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, you won’t be able to use the Apple Home app and HomeKit smart with it — not right away. You can still use the iOS and iPad OS app and set up Siri Shortcuts that work in light, but for now, you’ll have to wait for a light update that will bring support for Matter smart home standard before Home and Homekit functionality is fully realized. An over-the-air upgrade is expected in the coming months.
WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light: Competition
WiZ isn’t the only company making vertical app-and-smart-home controlled LED lights. Govee has been pricing aggressively in the smart home market, and its Govee RGBICW Smart Corner Floor Lamp offers similar functionality at a slightly cheaper RRP — even though Govee products are very regularly found in a discount. That particular model also offers more granular control over the colors displayed, giving you access to 14 separate zones to tweak, compared to the Pole Floor Light’s two (which you can’t can be manually defined separately, anyway).
However, I will warn that from some personal experience the Govee lights I’ve used in the past are less reliable than the WiZ devices, that the Govee light strips I’ve used fail to be found by my smart home network, which is stuck in certain lighting patterns indefinitely, and in one position will not be completely extinguished unless removed from the mains. So mileage may vary here.
WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light: Should you buy it?
Buy it if…
- You want to jazz up a corner of your room with smart lighting
- You want to be able to customize the appearance and behavior of the light
- You’ll be happy working with Siri Shortcuts until the Matter smart home standard comes out, or an Alexa or Google Home smart home interface
Don’t buy if…
- You’ll want to use the extension element — it’s too finicky to recommend using, in our experience
- Your smart lights should be integrated with Apple Home and HomeKit standards now
- You want more control over color combinations
WiZ Luminaire Pole Floor Light: Verdict
I love the Wiz Luminaire Pole Floor Light as much as I love the company’s previously reviewed product, the WiZ Luminaire Mobile Portable Light. But where those smart lantern features are unique and easy to set up, the Pole Floor Light can fail at times.
While it provides a nice glow from its preset options, and it’s well-priced and has a solid connection, it’s let down by a lack of full customization options in its color zones, and an annoying extension piece needed to increase its height. We’ll let it go because of its lack of HomeKit and Home app support at the moment, knowing that Matter support is on the way, but it’s a shame that Apple support isn’t better represented here by default either.
It’s a great lamp once set up, and I enjoy using it to change the mood of a room. But its few flaws keep it from a wholehearted recommendation, and inclusion in ours best selection of HomeKit smart lights.