Orchestra of Lights

We bought 2 strands of icicles and 1 strand of candy canes. We also bought the outdoor speaker and the indoor hub. There has been no improvement in 4 years to this system. No new music and if you don’t use their music, you don’t get the light show. If you stream your own music, everything just blinks. It’s very difficult to find new lights and many of the larger items are never available. This set is exclusive to Lowe’s and Lowe’s just isn’t stocking it. I keep hoping for more and better every year and nothing. Now let’s talk about how glitchy the app is. Every 2-3 days we go outside to find the timer hasn’t turned our lights on and we have to manually turn them on. Every other morning the timer hasn’t turned our lights off the way it’s suppose to. Finally, the quality of the icicles is horrible. We have an icicle break off in the wind every single year and have to buy a new strand. These strands are not cheap. I would expect them to last longer than two years. Very frustrating.

These lights are great when they work. Here lies the problem. Last year I had trouble with them in the beginning. Would work spontaneously. I reset them up and they worked. We’re really nice at Christmas. So we were excited to use them again this year. Upon setting them up I saw there was an update. Thinking this should make getting them setup and working even better I went ahead with the update. The update seemed to go well. We did have a new updated mesh Wi-Fi system so thought things should be so much better. Boy we’re we wrong. Had tons of trouble getting them to work. Finally did. Ok all’s good. Nope. Didn’t work. Reset all. Reconfigured. Tried again. Would tun on randomly to random settings. Tried it all one more time. It worked. Yes for about two days then the same problems. Firmware bugs? App bugs? Both? Or is it bad chips. All of the above. Do not buy!! Look elsewhere! Spend your money elsewhere. Wasted here. Very sad. What should of been a great product turns out to be a nightmare product for all.

The app definitely needs some work. Half the time the commands I give are ignored and that’s assuming an app update or hub firmware update didn’t break something. The syncing with custom music is pretty lackluster, and the customizations are limited. That being said, the lights do look nice when they are working, and if i leave them alone they tend to be fine. One other thing that irks me is that there’s no API or integration with other tools. I have a large investment in home automation, but this provides no way at all to integrate my lights into that automation. I’d settle for a simple on/off functionality (ex: Alexa turn on my Christmas lights) but even that is completely absent. Given the lights are on a hub to begin with adding an API to reach shouldn’t be that hard especially for local network integrations like Hubitat.