After truly four years of iteration, I finally feel like I landed on the perfect lighting setup for our house. It’s just smart enough for me. As per usual, my actual blog post is probably more...
After truly four years of iteration, I finally feel like I landed on the perfect lighting setup for our house. It’s just smart enough for me.
As per usual, my actual blog post is probably more detailed than necessary, but happy to answer any questions if folks have em!
I gave a little rueful smile when I got to the line "Anyone who’s ever worked with smart bulbs before knows where this is going." I did, I have felt exactly this frustration, and it felt like...
I gave a little rueful smile when I got to the line "Anyone who’s ever worked with smart bulbs before knows where this is going." I did, I have felt exactly this frustration, and it felt like every time I bought something (the smart bulbs were supposed to fix this!), I ended up having to set byzantine (not really, but it sure felt like it) rules to avoid messing things up. We were renting as well, so we couldn't do anything that involved touching the wiring or switches... My solution now in a new place, where the wiring is waaaaay newer and I am allowed to meddle with it is some nifty zigbee relays from sonoff. Zbminir2, to be specific.
The key is that this lets the normal switch on the wall work (a dealbreaking requirement for my partner, who had had enough of having to grab the phone to adjust lights, what a hero for sticking with my experiment for so long!), but they can work with a "disconnected relay", so clicking the switch doesn't actually break the circuit. This zbminir2 thing just notices that the voltage has changed (from 0 to 220ish, or vice versa) and sends the signal to the bulb to toggle on/off. Game changer, it's meant that I can combine cheap Ikea Tradfri bulbs (I do like the Hues, but I couldn't spring for them throughout the house, and Tradfris have slightly better CRI, I gather) with cheap everyday switch mechanisms.
I fully agree that the Adaptive Lighting integration is great, I signed up to push some cash their way, because the times that's saved my eyeballs from searing blue light late at night is unreal. On that note, when I'm walking home in the dark in the darker-eveninged seasons, I can't quite believe how many homes are still lit with a. a weird mix of colour temperatures or b. really harsh hospital clinic-esque colour temperatures. Warm lighting is absolutely essential for a cosy feeling, which I've learned over the years is what I want from my home.
I looked into the Sonoff relays at one point! I think I was concerned that they wouldn't physically fit in some of my switch boxes, which were PACKED. But I probably should have looked a bit...
I looked into the Sonoff relays at one point! I think I was concerned that they wouldn't physically fit in some of my switch boxes, which were PACKED. But I probably should have looked a bit harder. Ultimately, I think I ended up in a pretty similar place, with an always-on circuit and wireless-only light signalling. Also, my existing switches didn't have any dimming functionality, so I'm happier with the new rotary switches (I also just really like rotary switches).
It's very nice to hear that other folks have been adaptive-lighting-pilled haha. We're completely bought in, it's hard to imagine going back
I hear you on the size of them. Even though they bill themselves as being small (which they are) and they have lots of glossy pictures showing them just sliding into boxes just so easily behind...
I hear you on the size of them. Even though they bill themselves as being small (which they are) and they have lots of glossy pictures showing them just sliding into boxes just so easily behind switches ... in reality I couldn't fit them behind the switches, and it wasn't a close-run thing either. In the end, I wired them up in the "junction boxes" (is that the word? I mean the little box embedded in the wall in [pretty much] each room with wires going to the lights/switches/plugs for that room). It meant getting pretty familiar with the wiring in the whole house (which actually prompted getting a pro in to fix things, because I'm self-aware enough to realise that recognising something is wrong is one thing, but knowing how to fix it, and to what standard(s) is quite another).
I absolutely adore the "sleep mode" thing, I love that I can come down all bleary-eyed in the morning and get showered/changed in 1% light. Small details like that add up to have a serious impact on my day-to-day quality of life.
Especially now that we have an infant, the sleep mode is truly amazing. Someone has to get up to make a bottle around 4 or 5am most mornings, and doing so in very dim, very warm lights is...
Especially now that we have an infant, the sleep mode is truly amazing. Someone has to get up to make a bottle around 4 or 5am most mornings, and doing so in very dim, very warm lights is definitely the only reason everyone is able to go back to sleep for a few more hours afterward!
I would love some pictures! It’s a hard concept to discuss without but it’s totally fair if you’re not comfortable sharing. As someone from a country with a long tradition of ‘good lighting’...
I would love some pictures! It’s a hard concept to discuss without but it’s totally fair if you’re not comfortable sharing.
As someone from a country with a long tradition of ‘good lighting’ especially in terms of design it fascinates me that there aren’t any mentions of lamp choices, positioning etc. but more light bulbs and digital switch dimming in lack of a better word. Maybe that’s just your focus and I commend you for the hard work.
The title is more general than the topic haha, I was being a little dramatic. This is really about my saga to have automated temperature and brightness changes that follow the sunrise and sunset,...
The title is more general than the topic haha, I was being a little dramatic. This is really about my saga to have automated temperature and brightness changes that follow the sunrise and sunset, and finding the right setup for me and my family. We have almost no lamps in the house — there are very many ceiling lights, and being able to dim these has eliminated a lot of our need for lamps, which is nice.
I will try to find some time to share some pictures, though! What are you interested in seeing? The switches, or the actual lighting?
No sweat I thought that might be the case. Well naturally I’m most interested in the lights and surroundings but after reading about your struggles with the switches them too. Thanks!
No sweat I thought that might be the case. Well naturally I’m most interested in the lights and surroundings but after reading about your struggles with the switches them too. Thanks!
Agreed, I'm always interested in seeing switches "in situ", as it were, because I just do not trust the online photos from manufacturers/marketers. Especially on AliExpress, photoshopping items...
Agreed, I'm always interested in seeing switches "in situ", as it were, because I just do not trust the online photos from manufacturers/marketers. Especially on AliExpress, photoshopping items into backgrounds is too normalised, so you often don't know the true size of things until some blogger posts a review.
Thanks for the write up! We're about to upgrade our kitchen and I've been a little worried about what to get for lights. A friend's said that Philips hue, switches, and hub was the way to go and...
Thanks for the write up! We're about to upgrade our kitchen and I've been a little worried about what to get for lights. A friend's said that Philips hue, switches, and hub was the way to go and this now gives me zero hesitation. I won't be going with the home assistantant or other self hosted things, just commercial off the shelf things.
I hadn't thought about the issue of having the original switches exposed, so I'll look for something similar to your solution.
Nice! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! Yeah, I think hiding the original switches is a must, honestly. Otherwise, folks will absolutely just default to pressing the thing that...
Nice! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
Yeah, I think hiding the original switches is a must, honestly. Otherwise, folks will absolutely just default to pressing the thing that looks most familiar, and that won't be your smart switch haha.
I highly recommend the Lutron Auroras for smart switches. They look very nice, the feelt very high quality, and they work great with Hue. They look and feel much nicer than anything Philips sells, for sure.
I like that the hue switches can cycle through different scenes. That way I can choose which temperature or color I want. I'm not seeing that the Lutron ones can do that. I get that you have the...
I like that the hue switches can cycle through different scenes. That way I can choose which temperature or color I want. I'm not seeing that the Lutron ones can do that. I get that you have the automation to set it based on time of day, but I'm not there yet.
You can configure the center button of the Auroras to cycle different scenes, instead of always turning on to the same scene. I believe that the way that it works is that one press with turn the...
You can configure the center button of the Auroras to cycle different scenes, instead of always turning on to the same scene. I believe that the way that it works is that one press with turn the lights on, and then another press shortly after will begin cycling scenes, one per additional press.
But I don't do this haha. Ultimately, I just want the temperature tied to the time of day, so I just wanted the minimal light switch interface that would allow that.
FYI (not to try to derail your finally-attained lighting nirvana), you can connect Hue bulbs directly to Homeassistant via Zigbee, no Hue hub in the middle. If you're going to control them from...
FYI (not to try to derail your finally-attained lighting nirvana), you can connect Hue bulbs directly to Homeassistant via Zigbee, no Hue hub in the middle. If you're going to control them from hass, this setup is much better, as you avoid the delay from hass talking to the hub. (Given that my bulbs all have a few hundred millisecond transition time set, the delay is imperceptible to me.)
Technically speaking, this setup is what I would recommend to anyone with Hue bulbs looking to do home automation, since it lets you avoid Philips's consumer-unfriendly practices. However, it must be noted that Homeassistant can be extraordinarily unpleasant to set up¹, as you're surely aware. But IMO the entire field is a big continuum between "enshittified", "garbage", and "difficult"; my recommendation for normal people would be to invest in some decent-quality dimmers and bulbs which change color temp with brightness (annoyingly, Philips makes the best—only?—bulbs like this).
¹ It comes by the unflattering nickname "h-ass" honestly.
Yeah, the problem I had here was that my Home Assistant instance doesn't have a Zigbee receiver directly — I already had a Hubitat Elevation that does all of my other home automation (their...
Yeah, the problem I had here was that my Home Assistant instance doesn't have a Zigbee receiver directly — I already had a Hubitat Elevation that does all of my other home automation (their thermostat app is amazing!), so all of my Zigbee devices are available to Home Assistant through the Hubitat integration, which is over HTTP and very slow. This also would not have resolved the internal level issue that I had with the Auroras (I actually don't even know exactly how Hue works around this, I guess they have some API that allows them to update the level that isn't available on the generic Zigbee interface? Or maybe it's only Hubitat that couldn't do this and connecting directly to Home Assistant would have resolved it 🤷).
I was also under the impression that folks generally didn't recommend having like 30 Hue hulbs directly in your Zigbee network, though it's been a few years since I looked into this and maybe the recommendations have changed
Also also, yes Philips sucks, and I almost dropped the whole thing when they started requiring that I have an account and sign into it in order to configure my own lights in my own house. If I hadn't already purchased all of the lights and the hub, that probably would have turned me off from the whole product line
I really dislike Hue due to the whole needing an account thing, but I wanted some automated lights in the office. I say that about Hue, but then I’m hooked into Apple’s ecosystem already with a...
I really dislike Hue due to the whole needing an account thing, but I wanted some automated lights in the office.
I say that about Hue, but then I’m hooked into Apple’s ecosystem already with a HomePod mini, so I guess it’s not really the “having an account” thing, it’s the “having multiple accounts thing”.
Anyway, my current setup is “dumb” bulbs in desk lamps/accent lights plugged into Eve home plugs (since I rent, there was no overhead lighting to contend with).
I then have an Onvis Switch in a holder command stripped to the wall next to the light switch (which controls a floor lamp). So now, when I walk into the room, I turn on the switch for the floor lamp, and click the button for the desk lamps/accent lighting.
It works out pretty well, I can control the lights from the Onvis switch or my phone or Siri.
I'm glad you finally got your situation settled to your liking, but man, it really reinforced that this sort of thing is not for me. As an aside, do you have any idea of the power usage overheard...
I'm glad you finally got your situation settled to your liking, but man, it really reinforced that this sort of thing is not for me.
As an aside, do you have any idea of the power usage overheard from using these smart lighting/home assistant setups are? It probably isn't too much, but since it sounds like these switches need to always be in on state of "on" to communicate, it could add up in a larger home.
Pretty much nothing. It's not exactly like-for-like, but zigbee sensors often need to go a whole year on a single CR2032 battery. That's roughly 0.5Wh of consumption per year. An ESP32 chip, one...
Pretty much nothing. It's not exactly like-for-like, but zigbee sensors often need to go a whole year on a single CR2032 battery. That's roughly 0.5Wh of consumption per year.
An ESP32 chip, one of the thirstiest chips in this application, will be about 170Wh/month. But that's for WiFi, which unlike the zigbee in the Hue lights is not optimized for efficiency.
Thanks, that's really low, though I suppose it would add up if millions of people have several in their home (a guy I know has well over 40 Hue bulbs which I imagine is on the high end). My only...
Thanks, that's really low, though I suppose it would add up if millions of people have several in their home (a guy I know has well over 40 Hue bulbs which I imagine is on the high end). My only experience with zigbee was with my solar system in my previous home and it used significantly more, but it was also always sending data 24/7 so I can see why a lighting system would only need to be more active when state change.
The main OP was also talking about the switch controls also needing to connect as well as whatever is hosting home assistant, so that would add up too I suppose. I don't know what you can use to host that on.
The switches are all running on watch batteries as well, so basically 0 energy usage. Also, overall we use much less electricity to power our lights, since they're dimmed to 70% when the sun is...
The switches are all running on watch batteries as well, so basically 0 energy usage. Also, overall we use much less electricity to power our lights, since they're dimmed to 70% when the sun is down! And we're also much better about making sure all of yhe lights are off when we leave the house, since we can easily turn off every light by long pressing the switches at the front and back doors.
I already have a (pretty energy efficient) server that was running lots of other services — adding home assistant did not measurably affect its energy draw (which is usually around 100W)
I'm not sure I consider using disposable, though quite long life, batteries an improvement from an environmental standpoint, but it's good to hear that the power usage is quite low.
I'm not sure I consider using disposable, though quite long life, batteries an improvement from an environmental standpoint, but it's good to hear that the power usage is quite low.
Hue bulbs which are off but powered use on the order of 0.5W. The bulbs are active Zigbee routers, so they're constantly listening for and forwarding messages to other devices on the mesh. (This...
Hue bulbs which are off but powered use on the order of 0.5W. The bulbs are active Zigbee routers, so they're constantly listening for and forwarding messages to other devices on the mesh. (This is actually an important role; Zigbee is intentionally very short-range, so routers are needed to span a home.) I imagine you could design light bulbs which aren't routers and save quite a lot of that idle usage, since Zigbee is designed for low energy (as /u/tibpoe noted, battery-powered devices can get years of runtime on a single coin cell); but you'd have to start thinking about where to place routers or your network would be unreliable, and it's understandable that manufacturers don't want to impose that on users of already extremely fiddly smart home tech.
I have roughly 20 total light bulbs in my house; if all of them were Hue bulbs (and money grew on trees, lol), that would be an idle load of about 10W, or roughly a single additional LED light bulb left on all the time, or 90 kWhr over the course of a year, or $15/year at average US electricity prices.
This is more in line with what I was originally thinking. My friend with his whole house on Philips Hue bulbs obviously wasn't concerned about power cost considering how much he paid for the bulbs...
This is more in line with what I was originally thinking. My friend with his whole house on Philips Hue bulbs obviously wasn't concerned about power cost considering how much he paid for the bulbs alone. I've been trying to minimize my "always on" devices, which is why i originally commented. I used to have a whole mini server rack going 24/7, and once I got solar and started having detailed power usage and generation stats it made it glaringly clear how wasteful I was being. Now most of my stuff stays off and is on demand except for appliances, some chargers, and one low power server.
That was a great read and timely, I'm currently looking to do some changes to the lights at my place so thanks for posting. Where I think I'm leaning towards is having smart dimmers with Zigbee...
That was a great read and timely, I'm currently looking to do some changes to the lights at my place so thanks for posting. Where I think I'm leaning towards is having smart dimmers with Zigbee support installed, and keep my current lights. I won't be able to change colour/temperature, but should be able to get HA or something similar to control intensity. Hopefully the switches won't be much of an issue, but if they are I guess I'll make those changes later down the line.
I hadn't really thought about it, but lights turning on automatically and increasing intensity based of sunset times sounds great.
After truly four years of iteration, I finally feel like I landed on the perfect lighting setup for our house. It’s just smart enough for me.
As per usual, my actual blog post is probably more detailed than necessary, but happy to answer any questions if folks have em!
I gave a little rueful smile when I got to the line "Anyone who’s ever worked with smart bulbs before knows where this is going." I did, I have felt exactly this frustration, and it felt like every time I bought something (the smart bulbs were supposed to fix this!), I ended up having to set byzantine (not really, but it sure felt like it) rules to avoid messing things up. We were renting as well, so we couldn't do anything that involved touching the wiring or switches... My solution now in a new place, where the wiring is waaaaay newer and I am allowed to meddle with it is some nifty zigbee relays from sonoff. Zbminir2, to be specific.
The key is that this lets the normal switch on the wall work (a dealbreaking requirement for my partner, who had had enough of having to grab the phone to adjust lights, what a hero for sticking with my experiment for so long!), but they can work with a "disconnected relay", so clicking the switch doesn't actually break the circuit. This zbminir2 thing just notices that the voltage has changed (from 0 to 220ish, or vice versa) and sends the signal to the bulb to toggle on/off. Game changer, it's meant that I can combine cheap Ikea Tradfri bulbs (I do like the Hues, but I couldn't spring for them throughout the house, and Tradfris have slightly better CRI, I gather) with cheap everyday switch mechanisms.
I fully agree that the Adaptive Lighting integration is great, I signed up to push some cash their way, because the times that's saved my eyeballs from searing blue light late at night is unreal. On that note, when I'm walking home in the dark in the darker-eveninged seasons, I can't quite believe how many homes are still lit with a. a weird mix of colour temperatures or b. really harsh hospital clinic-esque colour temperatures. Warm lighting is absolutely essential for a cosy feeling, which I've learned over the years is what I want from my home.
I looked into the Sonoff relays at one point! I think I was concerned that they wouldn't physically fit in some of my switch boxes, which were PACKED. But I probably should have looked a bit harder. Ultimately, I think I ended up in a pretty similar place, with an always-on circuit and wireless-only light signalling. Also, my existing switches didn't have any dimming functionality, so I'm happier with the new rotary switches (I also just really like rotary switches).
It's very nice to hear that other folks have been adaptive-lighting-pilled haha. We're completely bought in, it's hard to imagine going back
I hear you on the size of them. Even though they bill themselves as being small (which they are) and they have lots of glossy pictures showing them just sliding into boxes just so easily behind switches ... in reality I couldn't fit them behind the switches, and it wasn't a close-run thing either. In the end, I wired them up in the "junction boxes" (is that the word? I mean the little box embedded in the wall in [pretty much] each room with wires going to the lights/switches/plugs for that room). It meant getting pretty familiar with the wiring in the whole house (which actually prompted getting a pro in to fix things, because I'm self-aware enough to realise that recognising something is wrong is one thing, but knowing how to fix it, and to what standard(s) is quite another).
I absolutely adore the "sleep mode" thing, I love that I can come down all bleary-eyed in the morning and get showered/changed in 1% light. Small details like that add up to have a serious impact on my day-to-day quality of life.
Especially now that we have an infant, the sleep mode is truly amazing. Someone has to get up to make a bottle around 4 or 5am most mornings, and doing so in very dim, very warm lights is definitely the only reason everyone is able to go back to sleep for a few more hours afterward!
I would love some pictures! It’s a hard concept to discuss without but it’s totally fair if you’re not comfortable sharing.
As someone from a country with a long tradition of ‘good lighting’ especially in terms of design it fascinates me that there aren’t any mentions of lamp choices, positioning etc. but more light bulbs and digital switch dimming in lack of a better word. Maybe that’s just your focus and I commend you for the hard work.
The title is more general than the topic haha, I was being a little dramatic. This is really about my saga to have automated temperature and brightness changes that follow the sunrise and sunset, and finding the right setup for me and my family. We have almost no lamps in the house — there are very many ceiling lights, and being able to dim these has eliminated a lot of our need for lamps, which is nice.
I will try to find some time to share some pictures, though! What are you interested in seeing? The switches, or the actual lighting?
No sweat I thought that might be the case. Well naturally I’m most interested in the lights and surroundings but after reading about your struggles with the switches them too. Thanks!
Agreed, I'm always interested in seeing switches "in situ", as it were, because I just do not trust the online photos from manufacturers/marketers. Especially on AliExpress, photoshopping items into backgrounds is too normalised, so you often don't know the true size of things until some blogger posts a review.
Thanks for the write up! We're about to upgrade our kitchen and I've been a little worried about what to get for lights. A friend's said that Philips hue, switches, and hub was the way to go and this now gives me zero hesitation. I won't be going with the home assistantant or other self hosted things, just commercial off the shelf things.
I hadn't thought about the issue of having the original switches exposed, so I'll look for something similar to your solution.
Nice! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
Yeah, I think hiding the original switches is a must, honestly. Otherwise, folks will absolutely just default to pressing the thing that looks most familiar, and that won't be your smart switch haha.
I highly recommend the Lutron Auroras for smart switches. They look very nice, the feelt very high quality, and they work great with Hue. They look and feel much nicer than anything Philips sells, for sure.
I like that the hue switches can cycle through different scenes. That way I can choose which temperature or color I want. I'm not seeing that the Lutron ones can do that. I get that you have the automation to set it based on time of day, but I'm not there yet.
You can configure the center button of the Auroras to cycle different scenes, instead of always turning on to the same scene. I believe that the way that it works is that one press with turn the lights on, and then another press shortly after will begin cycling scenes, one per additional press.
But I don't do this haha. Ultimately, I just want the temperature tied to the time of day, so I just wanted the minimal light switch interface that would allow that.
FYI (not to try to derail your finally-attained lighting nirvana), you can connect Hue bulbs directly to Homeassistant via Zigbee, no Hue hub in the middle. If you're going to control them from hass, this setup is much better, as you avoid the delay from hass talking to the hub. (Given that my bulbs all have a few hundred millisecond transition time set, the delay is imperceptible to me.)
Technically speaking, this setup is what I would recommend to anyone with Hue bulbs looking to do home automation, since it lets you avoid Philips's consumer-unfriendly practices. However, it must be noted that Homeassistant can be extraordinarily unpleasant to set up¹, as you're surely aware. But IMO the entire field is a big continuum between "enshittified", "garbage", and "difficult"; my recommendation for normal people would be to invest in some decent-quality dimmers and bulbs which change color temp with brightness (annoyingly, Philips makes the best—only?—bulbs like this).
¹ It comes by the unflattering nickname "h-ass" honestly.
Yeah, the problem I had here was that my Home Assistant instance doesn't have a Zigbee receiver directly — I already had a Hubitat Elevation that does all of my other home automation (their thermostat app is amazing!), so all of my Zigbee devices are available to Home Assistant through the Hubitat integration, which is over HTTP and very slow. This also would not have resolved the internal level issue that I had with the Auroras (I actually don't even know exactly how Hue works around this, I guess they have some API that allows them to update the level that isn't available on the generic Zigbee interface? Or maybe it's only Hubitat that couldn't do this and connecting directly to Home Assistant would have resolved it 🤷).
I was also under the impression that folks generally didn't recommend having like 30 Hue hulbs directly in your Zigbee network, though it's been a few years since I looked into this and maybe the recommendations have changed
Also also, yes Philips sucks, and I almost dropped the whole thing when they started requiring that I have an account and sign into it in order to configure my own lights in my own house. If I hadn't already purchased all of the lights and the hub, that probably would have turned me off from the whole product line
I really dislike Hue due to the whole needing an account thing, but I wanted some automated lights in the office.
I say that about Hue, but then I’m hooked into Apple’s ecosystem already with a HomePod mini, so I guess it’s not really the “having an account” thing, it’s the “having multiple accounts thing”.
Anyway, my current setup is “dumb” bulbs in desk lamps/accent lights plugged into Eve home plugs (since I rent, there was no overhead lighting to contend with).
I then have an Onvis Switch in a holder command stripped to the wall next to the light switch (which controls a floor lamp). So now, when I walk into the room, I turn on the switch for the floor lamp, and click the button for the desk lamps/accent lighting.
It works out pretty well, I can control the lights from the Onvis switch or my phone or Siri.
I'm glad you finally got your situation settled to your liking, but man, it really reinforced that this sort of thing is not for me.
As an aside, do you have any idea of the power usage overheard from using these smart lighting/home assistant setups are? It probably isn't too much, but since it sounds like these switches need to always be in on state of "on" to communicate, it could add up in a larger home.
Pretty much nothing. It's not exactly like-for-like, but zigbee sensors often need to go a whole year on a single CR2032 battery. That's roughly 0.5Wh of consumption per year.
An ESP32 chip, one of the thirstiest chips in this application, will be about 170Wh/month. But that's for WiFi, which unlike the zigbee in the Hue lights is not optimized for efficiency.
Thanks, that's really low, though I suppose it would add up if millions of people have several in their home (a guy I know has well over 40 Hue bulbs which I imagine is on the high end). My only experience with zigbee was with my solar system in my previous home and it used significantly more, but it was also always sending data 24/7 so I can see why a lighting system would only need to be more active when state change.
The main OP was also talking about the switch controls also needing to connect as well as whatever is hosting home assistant, so that would add up too I suppose. I don't know what you can use to host that on.
The switches are all running on watch batteries as well, so basically 0 energy usage. Also, overall we use much less electricity to power our lights, since they're dimmed to 70% when the sun is down! And we're also much better about making sure all of yhe lights are off when we leave the house, since we can easily turn off every light by long pressing the switches at the front and back doors.
I already have a (pretty energy efficient) server that was running lots of other services — adding home assistant did not measurably affect its energy draw (which is usually around 100W)
I'm not sure I consider using disposable, though quite long life, batteries an improvement from an environmental standpoint, but it's good to hear that the power usage is quite low.
Hue bulbs which are off but powered use on the order of 0.5W. The bulbs are active Zigbee routers, so they're constantly listening for and forwarding messages to other devices on the mesh. (This is actually an important role; Zigbee is intentionally very short-range, so routers are needed to span a home.) I imagine you could design light bulbs which aren't routers and save quite a lot of that idle usage, since Zigbee is designed for low energy (as /u/tibpoe noted, battery-powered devices can get years of runtime on a single coin cell); but you'd have to start thinking about where to place routers or your network would be unreliable, and it's understandable that manufacturers don't want to impose that on users of already extremely fiddly smart home tech.
I have roughly 20 total light bulbs in my house; if all of them were Hue bulbs (and money grew on trees, lol), that would be an idle load of about 10W, or roughly a single additional LED light bulb left on all the time, or 90 kWhr over the course of a year, or $15/year at average US electricity prices.
This is more in line with what I was originally thinking. My friend with his whole house on Philips Hue bulbs obviously wasn't concerned about power cost considering how much he paid for the bulbs alone. I've been trying to minimize my "always on" devices, which is why i originally commented. I used to have a whole mini server rack going 24/7, and once I got solar and started having detailed power usage and generation stats it made it glaringly clear how wasteful I was being. Now most of my stuff stays off and is on demand except for appliances, some chargers, and one low power server.
That was a great read and timely, I'm currently looking to do some changes to the lights at my place so thanks for posting. Where I think I'm leaning towards is having smart dimmers with Zigbee support installed, and keep my current lights. I won't be able to change colour/temperature, but should be able to get HA or something similar to control intensity. Hopefully the switches won't be much of an issue, but if they are I guess I'll make those changes later down the line.
I hadn't really thought about it, but lights turning on automatically and increasing intensity based of sunset times sounds great.