Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ixiaus | Hacker News Reader

We don't have a 220v version of the Plum Lightpad, otherwise I would offer to send one to you, but not all "smart" switches are quite as bad as your experience. We've done our best to focus on build quality, security, and usefulness (we do need a neutral though).

View on HN

This reminds me of another problem with home automation: there's plenty of cool devices produced in the US that I'm not able to use in a 240V country, because of the voltage difference.

I recently bought a Hue starter kit, but I'm having trouble finding affordable white (4000K-5000K colour temperature) bulbs that are rated for 240V and have Zigbee Lightlink support.

We have a lot of backers waiting on a European compatible version but it's a classic startup story for us: funding is the limitation. It requires a different power board in our product, which we're totally capable of designing, but the cost of maintaining those two versions, the cost and time to certify, and getting the contract manufacturer spun up for it is quite a hurdle in terms of bandwidth and money for us.

I believe we're aiming at building a European version once we've closed our Series A.

Yours do look lovely. Might get an electrician to give me a quote on rewiring some of the switches.

Either that or move to the USA ;-)

You could alternatively use a stepdown transformer, I suppose.

Bit hard to squeeze into a light switch :-)

Thanks, we've bled a lot to get this product built :-p If you do want one I can give you a discount coupon (my email is in my profile).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com