Wiz 48ft String Lights: Wiz-bang brilliant!

If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you’ll probably already know that I’m a smart home fan and that at the top of my list of favourite smart home gadgets are smart lights.

With smart lights, transforming the atmosphere of any room is as easy as asking Alexa or firing up an app. Rooms can instantly become a calming oasis of tranquillity, which is perfect for reading a book or watching the boob tube. Partying? No problem! Smart lights can easily add a festive atmosphere.

About the only real downside with smart lights has historically been their somewhat steep prices. Kitting out a home can cost the GDP of a small developing nation, which makes justifying an investment in smart lights to one’s wife a tricky proposition.

This must have been top of mind for the folks at Signify, who also make my favourite smart lighting range, Hue. Signify have launched Wiz, a value brand focused on smart lighting that won’t break the bank, but will still deliver peeper-pleasing smart lighting results.

Most of my smart lights – both inside and outside – are Hue and I’d never got the chance to try out Wiz lights until now. When offered a chance to test a set of 48-feet Wiz festive smart string lights, how could I refuse? Priced at $219.99, the Wiz string lights are not just affordable but have a high WAF (wife acceptability factor).

The string lights have a cool retro look to them, resembling the old-school-coloured filament bulbs that you’d find at a fairground. There are 12 bulbs in total and each consists of three 12-watt LEDs. These are attached to a 48-foot (14.6 metre) length of cable. A power supply is also included in the box and is a doddle to connect to the lights given its easy-to-fit screw connector. If you’re planning to use the lights outside (they are IP65 rated so they can handle wet weather, while the power adaptor is IP44, so it’ll need to be kept out of direct rain but can handle splashes) you’ll need either a sheltered outdoor weatherproof power socket (which must be installed by a registered electrician), or a way to route the power supply cable from an indoor location to outdoors.

Mounting the lights around a balcony at the back of our house was a straightforward undertaking thanks to mounting lugs built into each light fitting. These handily allowed me to attach the lights to nails at regular intervals along the underside of the balcony rail. Total install time was just shy of 30 minutes, which isn’t too shabby at all.

With the lights attached, I ran into the first (and only) snag getting the Wiz lights working. While the sparse manual contains easy-to-follow steps for connecting and installing the lights, a QR code (or even instructions) for obtaining the Wiz app (which is needed to drive the lights) was nowhere to be found. In the end, I decided to take a punt and just search for it on the Android app store, where I discovered that there are two Wiz apps. One was by Signify, so I downloaded it. Thankfully, it worked.

Getting the app up and running could not have been any easier. It detected the string lights instantly. After naming the lights based on where they were located (balcony), I was good to go. Not only do the Wiz lights not need a hub (yet another cost saver thanks to their WiFi support), but they also support Matter which confers them with ample future proofing, and most crucially, interoperability with smart home gear from other manufacturers.

After waiting for the sun to go down, I picked up my phone and fired up one of the default scenes in the Wiz app. It was Forest, which with a combination of natural-looking soft green and warm flickering yellow light, which added some magic to our back yard.

While the lights crank out a combined 120 lumens, they’re not bright enough to illuminate an entire area in their own right, but they do a great job with accent lighting.

Aside from the app hiccup, the lights were easy to set up and install and drive thanks to the super intuitive Wiz app. Add to this their super sharp sticker price and there’s plenty to like.

https://www.wizconnected.com/en-nz/p/outdoor-light-string-lights/8719514554498A