Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance Lily Outdoor Spot Light Kit Review (2024)

Outdoor lighting offers a great way to spruce up your yard, but wiring can be costly and time-consuming. That is, unless you use the Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance Lily Outdoor Spot Light Kit ($279.99). Specifically designed for the garden and patio areas of your home, these pricey outdoor lights let you bathe your yard in 16 million colors and create lighting scenes for every occasion. As with all Philips Hue lights, they work with numerous smart home devices and support multiple voice command services, and they are well-built and easy to install. As such, they earn our Editors' Choice for outdoor smart lighting devices.

Design and Features

The Lily Spot Light Kit comes with three lights, a power supply, three 23-foot power extension cords with male and female quick-connect plugs, two Y-shaped quick connect power adapters, and a user manual. Single lights are available for $79.99 each and extra 16-foot power cords (with adapters) go for $12.99. You can add up to five lights for each power supply and up to 50 lights for each Hue Bridge.

The lights are encased in a sturdy black aluminum cylindrical enclosure that is 4.5 inches long and 2.6 inches in diameter, with an IP65 weatherproof rating. The enclosure is attached to an L-shaped black metal mounting bracket using a thumbscrew that allows you to pivot the light up or down. The bracket has a threaded mounting post that lets you attach the light to a wall mounting plate or a garden spike. Each light also comes with a 5.2-inch threaded extension bar that offers a bit more placement flexibility, and has a hardwired 18-inch quick-connect power cable.

Inside each enclosure is a sealed 640-lumen (8-watt) LED bulb that has a white light temperature range of 2,000K to 6,500K and a 16-million-color palette. The bulbs are dimmable and have an expected lifespan of up to 25,000 hours. Also inside is circuitry for connecting the light to a Philips Hue bridge, which is not included but is necessary for controlling the lights using the Hue Android and iOS mobile apps. A Bridge will set you back another $59.99, but you only need one to control the Lily lights and all of your Philips Hue lighting devices. The power brick measures 2.3 by 4.6 by 1.5 inches (HWD) and has two mounting holes for attaching it to a fence post or the side of your house. It has a five-foot cord with a two-pronged AC plug on one end and a six-foot cord with a quick-connect adapter on the other end.

The Hue mobile app is thoughtfully designed and easy to use. It opens to a screen that displays all of your rooms by name, and if the lights are on, it shows the color of each one. Every room has an On/Off button, and if you tap the room you can control each light individually and do things like change the white light temperature, apply a color using the palette tool, or apply a scene. The app comes with eleven preset scenes including Tropical Twilight, which gives off a pink-ish hue; Savanna Sunset, which gives off a orange-ish hue; and Arctic Aurora, which gives off a blue-ish hue. You can also create your own scenes using the color temperature and color palette tools.

At the bottom of the home screen are buttons for Home, Routines, Explore, and Settings. The Routines button launches a menu for configuring things like Home and Away settings that will turn lights on and off using your phone's location services, Wake Up and Go To Sleep settings to have the lights turn on and gradually brighten in the morning and fade out at night, and Timer settings to trigger your lights after a certain period of time. Here you can also set up custom on/off routines based on sunrise, sunset, and specific times of day.

The Explore button offers information on Friends of Hue. Here you can learn about controlling Hue lights using Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Microsoft Cortana voice commands. This section also shows you how to integrate Hue lights with Nest, Vivint Smart Home, SmartThings, Comcast Infinity, Logitech Harmony, and IFTTT home automation platforms. Other Explore options include Apps We Like, a list of third-party apps, utilities, and widgets that work with Hue, and Hue Entertainment, which provides a list of entertainment apps and services that work with Hue lights, including DJ and synchronization apps. In the Hue Labs section you can learn how to use formulas to have Alexa and Siri make your lights transition through colors, fade in and out, and run through a playlist of scenes, and there's a collection of How-To videos to help you get the most out of your Hue lights.

The Settings button opens a screen where you can opt to connect to your lights from anywhere using your phone, configure your Hue Bridge, add a new Bridge, set up rooms, add new lights and accessories such as Hue dimmer switches and motion sensors, create entertainment areas where you can use apps to synchronize lighting effects, and enable HomeKit and Siri control. Advanced settings include home location parameters and an option that lets you fine-tune sunset and sunrise start times.

Installation and Performance

I decided to install the three lights in my backyard garden using the included spikes. I chose this location because the garden runs the length of my pool and I wanted to illuminate both the garden area and the pool area. Installing the lights was easy: I attached the spikes to the bottom of each light and placed them in the garden, strategically spacing them 11 feet apart from each other so that they would color my garden wall and reflect off the water in my in-ground pool. I connected them to each other using the power extension cables and the Y-shaped adapters and connected the power brick to the light that was closest to my outdoor GFCI power outlet. Once they were plugged in, the lights came on immediately and I set about adjusting the angle of each one for maximum effect.

If you're looking for bright lighting effects, the Lily lights will likely disappoint. Don't get me wrong, these lights provide excellent colors and whites, but they are designed for ambiance rather than big light, and as such deliver a soft, relaxed lighting effect. I created my own USA scene (red, white, and blue) and an Irish flag scene (green, white, and orange), but particularly liked the way the Savanna Sunset scene reflected off the pool water, giving it an orange glow that did indeed resemble the color of a setting sun. The lights followed my schedule without fail and reacted instantly to on and off commands and color changes using the mobile app.

I had no trouble controlling the lights using Alexa voice commands. I created a room that I named Pool and was able to turn all of the lights on and off at once or individually using their specific names. I was also able to change colors and dim each light using voice commands. Siri voice commands were equally responsive. My IFTTT applet to have the lights turn blue whenever there was a scoring update in a Yankees game also worked like a charm.

Conclusions

If you're looking to add subtle lighting effects to your yard, look no further than the Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance Lily Outdoor Spot Light Kit. You'll pay top dollar for it, but in return you get three-easy-to-install lights that are built to withstand the elements. You can use the intuitive mobile app to control color, dim the lights, and set scenes to display a certain ambiance, or you can incorporate the lights into a number of home automation platforms and control them using any of the popular voice command services. All this earns the Lily Outdoor Spot Light Kit our Editors' Choice for outdoor smart lighting.