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Nanoleaf Matter Essentials LED Bulb review

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A photo of the Nanoleaf Matter Essentials B22 LED Bulb in a light fitting

I’ve bought myself a Nanoleaf Matter/Thread Essentials LED bulb (sponsored link) to use with another PIR motion sensor (see my review of that from a couple of weeks ago). Unlike last time, this is a Matter over Thread bulb, rather than a Zigbee bulb.

Whilst many of the smart home products I have bought recently have been Zigbee devices, I’m reasonably convinced that Matter and Thread are the future of home automation. To date, I’ve only picked up Matter smart plugs – some Meross Wi-Fi plugs and some Onvis Thread plugs – so this is the first Matter bulb that I’ve bought.

Connecting over Matter

This Nanoleaf Essentials bulb connects over Thread, rather than Wi-Fi. This is probably why there is a ‘Frequently returned item’ warning on the Amazon listing, as it won’t work well without a Thread Border Router. Thankfully, I have three – two Google Wi-Fi devices, and my Home Assistant instance with a USB dongle. Like Zigbee, Thread is a mesh network, and so these three border routers, and my two Onvis plugs have formed a relatively good Thread mesh. That’s good, because this bulb is in a room on its own some distance from any of the border routers, but it’s able to join the mesh with the Onvis plugs.

As it’s a Matter device, I was able to add it to Home Assistant, Google Home and Apple Home with no issues. Nanoleaf include the necessary QR code on the instruction manual as well as the bulb itself, which is helpful. The bulb also supports Bluetooth, partly for commissioning onto the Thread network, but it can also be controlled by Bluetooth using the Nanoleaf app if you don’t have a Thread Border Router. However, due to Bluetooth’s short range, I doubt this will be much use to many people.

Appearance and usage

The design of the bulb is a little odd. Unlike most LED bulbs, it’s not a smooth spherical surface, but a series of blocky geometric shapes. I’d prefer a smooth look, personally.

The bulb was quite responsive when using it with Google Home. It’s a colour changing and dimming model, and when it turns on and off, it fades up or down, which is a nice touch. I found controlling it with Home Assistant a little more hit and miss – sometimes, turning it on took a few seconds, but other times it was instant. I’ll need to look into why that is.

Cost

The thing that mainly drew me to this bulb is its price – literally just five of your Great British Pounds. That’s not quite as cheap as the £4.33 Zigbee bulb that I previously bought from AliExpress, but as it’s from Amazon, I didn’t have to wait a week for shipping. And as it’s a Matter bulb, it’s better supported by Google and Apple. I just wish it was a little less ugly, but at £5, you can’t really argue.

Grouping devices together in Home Assistant

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A screenshot of a Home Assistant dashboard showing a light group set to 50% brightness and a green colour

If you have several devices of the same type, and want to be able to control them all together, then it’s possible to group them together in Home Assistant. The integration is simply called ‘Group‘, and once configured, it creates a helper entity that will perform the same action on all grouped devices.

Last year, I picked up two Zigbee colour-changing LED strips from AliExpress. One was to go in our nine-year-old’s bedroom and the other in the living room – the idea being that we could set the colours depending on the time of year. Rather than having Christmas lights that we put up in December, and took down in January, these lights could stay up all year round. For example, they could be pink around Valentines Day, or green at Halloween.

That was the theory. However, despite ordering 3 metre long strips, they were too short. Our house is about 100 years old with tall ceilings, and consequently, tall windows. In the end, two LED strips together, totalling 6 metres, were long enough just for one window and so they’re both in our nine-year-old’s bedroom. Because they’re two separate strips, they appear and work as separate Zigbee devices.

Creating a group in Home Assistant

You can start the process of creating a group either on the Integrations or Helper screens of Home Assistant’s settings. First of all, Home Assistant will ask you what type of devices you are grouping – all the devices must be of the same type, so you can’t group a switch and a light together.

Well, actually you can – but first you need to create a ‘Change Device Type of a Switch’ helper. Say you have a smart plug controlling a light; you can then create a Helper that appears as a Light, and then that can be grouped with other lights.

Anyway, in my example, I selected Light, gave it a name, and then selected the entities that needed to belong to the group – i.e. the individual lights. There’s also a ‘Hide Members’ option, which will hide the devices you’ve selected from the list of entities in Home Assistant. If you’ll only ever want to interact with the lights as a group, then tick this. However, if you still want to be able to manage individual lights as well, then keep it unticked.

On my Home Assistant dashboard, the icon shows that the new group helper is for multiple lights. The good news is that, even with colour changing lights, all the lights in the group will respond the same way together once grouped.

I also make these lights available in Apple Home and Google Home, and again, I make sure that Home Assistant is exposing the group, rather than the individual lights. As such, when I use Google Assistant to turn them on and change the colour, both lights change simultaneously.