Eglo smart light

Are you looking for a simple to install, sleek yet unobtrusive, Zigbee LED light that works well with Home Assistant? I was and I found the Eglo connect.Z series of lights that work amazingly well for me for a reasonable price.

Sometimes less is more

I was recently looking for some new ceiling lights. Usually I like them to be something special, I build them myself, sometimes try to do something closer to art or at least look for an interesting shape. This time the goal was different: something somewhat sleek but most importantly something that blends in, neither takes too much height nor catches the eye to much. Why? Because these lights are for the (lower ceiling) bathroom and hallway.

In these rooms light just needs to be there but not take the spot”light”. This means instead of bigger ceiling lamps that require (smart) lightbulbs I started looking for integrated solutions. Of course they still need to support Zigbee & Home Assistant and I was looking for warm and cold white light support as well.

The Eglo connect.Z line

I quickly found a couple of nice looking devices from the Philips Hue line. I like their products and use a bunch of different smart LED bulbs from them but where those are already relatively expensive the prices for some of their lamps were jaw-dropping. Time for a little bit more searching.

If you want some of the lights and to support the blog here are some affiliate links:
– smaller white Eglo connect light
– bigger black Eglo connect light
– Raspberry Pi 5 to run Home Assistant on

I searched and I found. On Amazon I found the Eglo products. They have light bulbs but also light panels and round ceiling lights. All of them are quite affordable in the 40-60 Euro range usually. I ordered (this was already a year or two ago) one of their bigger rounded ceiling lights in a black color

I like the clear design – quite simple yet somewhat elegant. Nothing too fancy, there are definitely more beautiful lights out there but good enough. Just what I was looking for. Given that when I was recently looking for a replacement for my dying bathroom light I went back to that and ordered a smaller white version of the lamp.

Installation

Installation was relatively easy with one baseplate screwing into the ceiling and then the lamp connected to that. I don’t quite remember how the cables were connected but the second, smaller, lamp has a much more interesting mounting mechanism anyways.

It seems like the power supply is separate from the lamp here (which I really like from a repairing perspective) and will be mounted to the ceiling first. You have four mounts for screws to securely connect it and then two (nicely clicky) terminals that you connect the wires to. Afterwards the actual lamp just gets pushed onto mount and clicks into place. Interest fact: it looks like they are using a USB C connector to connect both parts.

I really like the idea behind this and it fully hides the mounts of the lamp and is relatively straight forward to install. Very interesting approach but it comes with some drawbacks I noticed as well: there is not a lot of space inside the lamp to hide leftover cable and it is only available in specific spots. This means you need to hide as much of the cable inside the wall as possible and plan ahead a little bit. It can also be difficult to install if the ceiling is not perfectly flat.

I also disliked the feedback from pushing the two parts together a little bit. There is no indicator on the outside so I needed a couple tries to get both pieces to fit together perfectly. In the end it is not very difficult though.

A light in the dark?

Now the most important part: how well do these lamps actually illuminate things? Very well actually, thank you for asking. They are quite bright, easily bright enough to illuminate my small bath and hallway. They have a nice range of white lights from quite warm to very cold white. It seems like the warm white is not quite as nice (subjectively) as the Hue light bulbs but still good enough to create a cozy evening environment.

They are not only white lights though, they do come with full RGB LEDs as well. I personally don’t really use the colors much but it is a nice option to have, for example for notifications (like my doorbell). They are probably not good enough for professional use but everyday use should not be a problem.

How do they work with Home Assistant & ZHA

I am using the lights with Home Assistant as I do with all of my smart home devices. I specifically picked these for their Zigbee (3.0) support so integrating them with Home Assistant is quite simple.

My setup currently consists of a Raspberry Pi 5 running Home Assistant (and a bunch of other tools) using Docker and docker-compose plus the Tubeszb Zigbee controller with ZHA. Connecting the lamps is simple but for some reason they made reset mode quite tedious (german description can be found here).

• start by turning the light off (on the light switch) for about 30 seconds
• 1 second on
• 6 seconds off
• 1 second on
• 6 seconds off
• 1 second on
• 6 seconds off
• 12 seconds on
• 6 seconds off
• 12 seconds on
• 6 seconds off
• on

Now the lamp should indicate that it is ready. In my case that was a short blinking and up & down dimming. Then start the search for new devices in ZHA and wait a little bit for the lamp to show up. This could take some time.

Once connected the lamps expose all the needed settings via Home Assistant. There is one light entity you can use to turn the lights on or off, dim or change the color/temperature. There is also a separate setting for how the light should react when turned on (stay on, off or resume the last state) after a power failure.

Conclusion

Overall I am very happy with my decision to get those Eglo ConnectZ lights. You need to judge for yourself if you like the design but I am happy with the unobtrusive yet high-grade look and so far I am very happy with the way they hold up. I have had the bigger light for about two years and everything still works great. I am usually not a big fan of integrated lights but here they seem to have made an effort to at least keep lights and power supply separated.

The installation process is well designed although I would like to see some more improvements in that area, like a bigger cutout to store the cord and some marker on the outside indicating how to remove the light again.

The lights are quite powerful, enough to fully illuminate smaller rooms and integrate well with Home Assistant (at least with ZHA), no need to use their own app.