LIFX SuperColor Spot review: Smart, colorful landscape lighting

Best Prices Today: LIFX SuperColor Spot

LIFX’s return to the smart home market continues with a second product designed for the outdoors: a color spotlight designed for brightening up your yard. The catch? LIFX’s SuperColor Spot is the brand’s first product that connects not to standard electrical power but to low-voltage lighting wiring, powered by a standard landscape transformer. 

The nuts and bolts of low-voltage wiring for the outdoors can be intimidating for newcomers, and the spotlight itself is expensive. That said, the results were certainly eye-catching, even if you end up installing only one or two of the spots.

The LIFX SuperColor Spot brings all the power of a full-color smart light to your exterior space.

Low-voltage landscape wiring: the basics

If you’re unfamiliar with landscape lighting, it’s a very different technology than what you get with a typical household outlet.

The transformer–typically a rather industrial metal box, sold separately–connects to a household outlet and steps the voltage down from 120 volts to as little as 12V.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart lights.

One of the main appeals of low-voltage wiring is that it is considered “touch safe,” so there’s very little risk of a shock even if you touch an exposed wire. This makes it ideal for use outside, in wet or rough conditions, or anywhere you don’t want to run a standard electrical cord. 

Landscape lighting is unique in the way that lights connect to the electricity source, but setting it up is fairly simple. Landscape wiring–which consists of two paired wires–is sold in bulk spools, and you roll it out from the transformer to wherever you want to place your lights.

Landscape lights can be spliced and soldered into place anywhere along the length of the wire, but much more common is the use of “vampire taps,” which are plastic connectors outfitted with metal spikes that stab into each side of the wire as they clip onto it. The tiny spikes complete the circuit, connecting light to wire to transformer and feeding power to the bulb. 

Transformers supply a limited amount of total wattage, from 30 to 300 watts or more. A typical home transformer will supply 100 to 200 watts of power. Each light connected to the transformer will draw from that available wattage, so homeowners need to keep track of how many lights they want to have and how much power each light uses. Also, power drops off based on the length of the wire and even the gauge (thickness) of the wire, requiring a bit of math for anyone setting up landscape lights for the first time, or when adding new lights to an existing setup. 

All of this is important because low-voltage lights typically consume only a few watts of power, so even a small transformer can light up an entire backyard.

I just purchased a pack of LED lights that each consume just 3 watts of power and provide 172 lumens of lighting. That’s a negligible draw on my 200-watt transformer. But just one of LIFX’s smart spotlights consumes 27 watts–nearly 10 times the power draw of a standard LED light.

Again, it’s not a big problem with a 200-watt transformer, but those with smaller transformers or those wanting multiple LIFX SuperColor Spots may have to consider an upgrade. (LIFX officially says a beefy 300-watt transformer with 15-volt output is a minimum requirement, as is 12-guage wiring. However, everything worked fine during my testing with a 200-watt, 12-volt transformer.) 

All of that is a lengthy and perhaps overly dramatic prologue for a review of a product that I actually like quite a bit. Traditional landscape spotlights are dim and boring. But like LIFX’s String Lights, the LIFX SuperColor Spot brings all the power of a full-color smart light to your exterior space.

Design and setup

The size of the SuperColor Spot may be problematic for some. The positionable light itself is over 5 inches tall, not including the stand, which can be extended and can attach to either a metal ground spike or a mounting plate that you screw into a solid surface; both mounting options are included.

It’s an attractive piece of hardware even though it certainly doesn’t blend in with the environment, but it’s the cord and breakout box that are far more obtrusive. This snarl of extra cables (pictured below) feels like it could and should have been built into the spotlight hardware directly. Instead, I’m left with a length of exposed wires that are tough to hide; eventually, I’ll probably try to bury them. 

The LIFX SuperColor Spot supports Apple HomeKit, Matter, or direct setup though the LIFX app (only 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks only are supported, per usual). The LIFX app quickly discovered the light without the need for a QR code scan by simply bringing my phone near the powered-up device.

After a brief firmware update, I was able to program schedules, configure favorites, and add the light to a group in Alexa. (Google Home and Samsung SmartThings are also supported.) Oddly, the light did not initially appear in my Apple Home app, although the HomeKit connection routine was launched during setup. A separate scan of the QR code printed on the light and included with the manual eventually completed the job. 

Features and performance

At maximum brightness, the SuperColor Spot pumps out 1,600 lumens, and in white light mode it can be set at a color temperature ranging from a very warm 1500 Kelvin (similar to candlelight) to an ultra-cool 9000K (the shade of a clear blue sky), an unheard-of range for the smart light space.

Naturally, a full-color mode courtesy of LIFX’s new “Polychrome” LEDs allow the light’s three addressable zones to produce three different colors simultaneously, and with its variety of FX modes, they can shift back and forth among them, constantly adjust their brightness, and even move in time with music.

I don’t love the overly complex LIFX mobile app, but it does make experimentation fun and, with a little trial and error, you can easily settle on a theme for just about any occasion. 

While bright enough to be easily visible during the day, it’s at night when the spotlight really shines, transforming a dark outdoor space into a colorful playground. And since I only have one LIFX Spot Light connected to my transformer, overloading the transformer’s wattage isn’t a concern. 

Control is a separate, thornier issue. Most landscape lighting users use the transformer’s built-in timer to control on/off times; mine, like many, has an electronic eye that allows me to set the transformer to turn on at dusk and stay on for a few hours before shutting off for the night, which is an easy and effective–but not very “smart”–way to control all the traditional lights on the string.

With this setup, the LIFX Spot is only controllable while the power is on. I can’t turn the spotlight on separately from other lights on the wire unless I want everything else to stay on 24/7–which I don’t. There’s no workaround for this aside from converting all the lights in the yard to LIFX lights and leaving the transformer on around the clock, so for now I’m leaving the transformer timer in control and just using the LIFX app to tune lighting colors and effects when it’s on. 

Specifications

• Dimensions: 5.2 x 5.3 x 3 inches (HxDxW)
• Brightness: up to 1,600 lumens
• White color temperature: 1,500-9,000 Kelvin
• Wireless: Wi-Fi (2.4GHz only)
• Wiring: Low-voltage
• Smart home integrations: Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings
• Matter support: Yes

Should you buy the LIFX SuperColor Spot?

At $80 per spotlight–two to five times the cost of a traditional spotlight–the LIFX SuperColor Spot is beyond my budget for a large-scale implementation.

However, installing one or two as accents on an otherwise simpler strand of landscape lights isn’t prohibitively costly, and the finished product does indeed look impressive. 

Best Prices Today: LIFX SuperColor Spot