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Comment by orestes910 | Hacker News Reader

While pricey, the Hue Tap seems to be a good middle ground. Its powered by the press of the button itself, so no wiring needs to take place. Pair, stick it onto a wall, and then you have 3 light switches ready to go.

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As an owner of Hue lights, I can unequivocally state that the Tap sucks. I have all sorts of alarms and geofences so that my lights turn off and on with little or no manual intervention, so the Tap might get used only a few times a week. Since the device didn't hold much of a charge, I would have to tap it multiple times before it responded. The damn thing also turned out to be pretty flimsy; it just plain stopped working after about 6 months.

Though, in my experience the geofencing stuff works pretty badly if you have multiple devices connected to Hue (so, have multiple people living in the same flat). The lights would turn off when one person leaves, even though others are still inside.

Kind of same thing with alarms: they would turn lights on to dim them when nobody's home, etc

Interesting. I have about 10 Hue Taps in my house. The nice thing about this is that I was able to gauge the performance of each switch against the others. In my experience, some of the switches work better than others. The poor ones can be so bad that they are borderline useless while the good ones function more or less like a standard light switch. I returned and replaced all of my finicky switches. I recommend that you do the same if you are experiencing issues.

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