The BeON Home Starter Pack ($199) gives new meaning to the term smart lighting. Designed to provide a proactive approach to home security, the BeON bulbs will learn your typical lighting schedule and replay it when you’re away to make it look like you’re home. They also react to smoke alarms and doorbells and will continue to provide light in the event of a power outage. At $199 for a 3-pack starter kit, $398 for a 7-pack, or $75 each, the bulbs don’t come cheap, and you can’t create your own schedule or control the lights remotely. On the bright side, they do offer a measure of security and safety for your home and are very easy to install and configure.
Design and Features
The BeON Starter Pack ($55.14 at Walmart) consists of three LED light bulbs, three Bluetooth-enabled plug-in modules, and an app for iOS and Android mobile devices. The standard A21-size bulbs are 10-watt dimmable with an 800 lumen output, which is equivalent to a 60-watt incandescent bulb. They give off a soft white (3000K) light and are rated to last 25,000 hours, or 22 years based on 3 hours of daily use. Each bulb weighs 6.4 ounces, which is a bit lighter than both the Ilumi A19 Smartbulb ($47.57 at Amazon) and the Nyrius LED Multicolor Light Bulb ( at Amazon) (each 7.2 ounces). What sets the bulbs apart from other smart bulbs we’ve tested is the trapezoid-shaped opening in the base, which is actually a receptacle for the modules that give these bulbs their smarts.
The yellow modules are trapezoid-shaped and measure 2.7 inches long and 1.3 inches in height. Each end has multiple holes in a circular pattern for the internal microphone and there are 12 contact terminals on top that connect to their mates in the base receptacle. The modules contain Bluetooth circuitry that allows the bulbs to communicate with your Bluetooth-enabled smartphone and with each other in a mesh network. However, they don’t support Wi-Fi or Z-Wave (at least not yet), which means the bulbs cannot be controlled outside of their 30-foot Bluetooth range, and can’t interact with home automation devices such as the Samsung SmartThings or Wink hubs. They also lack support for If This Then That (IFTTT) recipes. The good news is the folks at BeON are planning to add Z-Wave functionality and other features in the future and will make the upgrades available with new modules.
The modules also contain a rechargeable battery that provides up to four hours of emergency lighting in case you lose power or when the light switch is turned off, and memory that stores your lighting schedule for when you’re away. You don’t have to do anything to create the schedule; simply use your lights as you normally would during the course of a 7-day period and the module learns and replays the schedule when you enable the Security Lighting mode. While this is a cool feature, it’s not the best solution for users who don’t have a regular routine, and there is no way to create a customized schedule that will override the learned schedule.
BeOn Home Starter Pack
App
The app is tastefully designed and a snap to use. The opening screen gives you three choices including Security Lighting, Welcome Home, and Safety Lighting. Swiping the light bulb icon at the bottom of the screen takes you to the Bulb Settings page which lists each installed bulb. Clicking on a bulb lets you adjust its brightness level, turn the bulb on/off, and check the battery level. Here you can also rename the bulb if you decide to change its location, add new bulbs, and edit your account information.
The Security Lighting page has a button for enabling the learned schedule while you’re away and will tell you which bulbs are included in the schedule (if you haven’t used a bulb lately it is marked as outdated and is not included in the schedule). At the bottom of the page are buttons for Lighting, Doorbell, and Activation. Tapping the Lighting button displays your schedule and has a Preview button that replays the schedule in a time lapsed simulation so you can see when your lights will go on and off. Use the Doorbell button to train the bulbs to recognize the sound of your doorbell and select a lighting sequence. Enabling the Activation button lets you disable the learned schedule by turning off any BeON bulb light switch.
Tapping the Welcome Home icon automatically turns on selected BeON lights for three minutes and is ideal for lighting doorway entrances at night. The Safety Lighting page offers an Exit Lighting option that turns your lights on when your smoke or CO alarm sounds. As with the doorbell option you have to train the bulbs to listen for the sound of the alarm. The Power Outage page lets you choose which bulbs will turn on when the power goes out and at what brightness level. My favorite feature, the Slow Fade, let’s you choose which bulbs will slowly dim to off when you switch off the light. It gives you ten seconds of low light when you turn off the lights so you won’t be left in the dark when turning in for the night.
BeOn Home Starter Pack
Installation and Performance
There’s no programming involved in setting up the BeON bulbs. Start by downloading the iOS or Android app, create an account, and tap Get Started. Next, slide the module into the opening in the base until it clicks into place. The bulb will become illuminated for around ten seconds. Next, just screw the bulb in to any lamp or lighting fixture, turn the fixture on, and tap Add New Bulbs. In my case it took around 10 seconds for all three bulbs to be identified and another 20 seconds for them to be initialized. At this point you can tap each bulb to rename it.
Training the bulbs to react to the doorbell and smoke alarm is simply a matter of pressing the alarm or doorbell while in Training mode and waiting for the bulb to recognize the sound and store it in memory. I completed both training sessions in under two minutes and the bulbs reacted within seconds of each doorbell and smoke alarm trigger.
In testing, the bulbs turned on and off according to their learned schedule when Security Lighting mode was enabled and never failed to illuminate when I used the Welcome Home feature, even when the switch was turned off. That said, I wouldn’t mind the option of choosing how long they remain lit; three minutes may not always be enough time to conduct a quick sweep of the house. I ran the bulbs at full brightness without power and they lasted a little more than two hours before requiring a charge. With the brightness set to around 50 percent I saw just under four hours of light.
Conclusion
The BeON Starter Pack provides an easy, albeit expensive way to add a measure of security to your home, by simulating your typical daily lighting schedule while you’re away. It does a fine job of providing safety lighting when your smoke alarm is triggered, and lights up your entryway when someone rings your doorbell. While it’s nice that the bulbs will learn your lighting habits, having the ability to create your own schedules would be a nice addition, as would having the ability to turn the lights on and off with your smartphone when you’re not home. If you’re looking for a lighting system that lets you create customized on and off schedules and offers remote lighting control, consider the Belkin WeMo + Osram Lightify White Tunable Starter Set . It comes with only two bulbs, but is significantly less expensive than the BeON kit and connects via Wi-Fi, so you can control them from anywhere. The WeMo bulbs also support IFTTT triggers and work with other WeMo home automation devices.
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