LumenIZE

I had recently bought a shadedweller LumenIZE for my leopard gecko, hoping to upgrade my boy’s heating and lighting systems. I set up the light, and so far everything was going great. The light was turning on and off, and functioning properly. The reason I give this app one star is because I downloaded it, started scanning for devices, and absolutely nothing came up. I’ve tried multiple things to fix this, and NOTHING worked. Every time I scanned, it would say “scanning” and then under the devices area, there would be nothing. I have contacted Monkfield Reptiles(working with Arcadia I believe) and alerted them of this problem. If the response solves this issue, then my review will be updated, but unless the app improves its connection ability to bluetooth, it won’t be receiving 5 stars from me. Besides the app, the light works fantastic. The whole issue however is the app. I am now updating this review after about a week, after struggling through the process of receiving a response from Monkfield Reptiles(they responded very efficiently), and finding a replacement lamp. Monkfield Reptiles suggested I go to the store where I first bought my lamp, and get a replacement. I did this, got a replacement, tried it out, and the issue persists. I now believe that this problem is related to the app, and not my lamp. Unfortunately, I don’t think I will be purchasing Arcadia products again.

I should have read the app reviews before purchasing these expensive lights. I have a 24w PRO T5 UVB light and the led bar for my bearded dragon. The website makes huge promises of being able to easily set dawn and dusk like lighting. No that is not the case. There are 2 built on programs, on is just on 100% and off 100% at 7am and 7pm. There other jumps to 50% at 5:30am, 75% at 6:30am and 100% at 7am. How is that mimicking a sunrise??!?? You can’t change these, so your only option is going through the cumbersome and tedious process of adding time intervals and light brightness. I created a custom schedule where it increases 10% every 10 minutes. So over an hour and a half it gradually gets brighter (like a real sunrise)! Great right? Wrong. Lose power or unplug the light and your custom settings go “poof” and you get to do it all over again. My basking bulb is connected to a smart life plug in programmable dimmer. In that app, I set a wake up start time, how long I want it to take and at what brightness I want it to end. Takes 20 seconds to setup, it works, it’s easy, doesn’t delete settings when it looses power. I probably should have just sent the fixtures back, but I have hope they will make the app better since it’s a new product. I’ll update my review if that ever happens.

The UI is incredibly basic - you can set a schedule or switch to “manual” and just control the light directly. Honestly it reeks of “My First IOS App”. We set up a schedule yesterday, and had it in “Auto” mode, but it didn’t turn the light down then off like the schedule said. Is there something we need to do to “apply” the schedule? No idea. Do we need to have our phone always powered on and with this app open? You can set five “custom” schedules, but can’t name them. The UI to do this is horrible (the time dials UX widget, always defaulting to “now” instead of maybe the last time dialed in), and we found it frequently would “forget” the settings if we close and reopen the app (0% reset to 100%). And the “Data Manager” screen just show a mislabeled graph (we are on Custom 1 but it shows Custom 5 with the data from Custom 1) that is just the main screen turned 90°. “My Animal Records” is just a big text entry field … why in the world would anyone use that? Obvious features are missing: - no seasonal adjustment to dial in - no following local (or selected location) sunrise/sunset times - no integration with HomeKit (Siri), Alexa, Google, etc It makes me wonder why we spent so much money on this “smart” light strip, which has few aspirations aside from mimicking a simple timer function. This just seems like a gimmick that Lumenize itself doesn’t see any value in aside from a sales point on the side of the box.