Any deals on Hue bulbs?

set up this in IFTTT. you can set up a search in ebay but you only get an email once a day and the deal will be gone by the time you get it.
LINK

set up a search for the exact model # of the bulbs. I know of at least 3 hue makes in the a19 form:
- white dimmable (all you can do is dim) #455295
- white ambiance (you can change the whiteness/warmth and also dim) #461004
- color (gen1, gen2 and gen3) different model #s

be patient & ready to act when a deal pops up but always check the seller rating first to make sure its a legit sale

follow these steps and you'll find them for less than $15 but you'll need to be patient.

Here's a 4 pack for $26 from a legit seller and he's throwing in 4 candelabra bases LINK

Thanks for the advice and the ifttt tip, going to have to use that one often. I already have the Hub and a few bulbs, trying to update the rest of the house.

Amazon and Home Depot have a deal running for the 4 bulb 3rd gen color starter kits. $139.97 instead of $199:
Slickdeals LINK

Amazon LINK

Home Depot LINK

You're getting the lights and bridge at $27.99 each. The comment section in the Slickdeals link provides some more insight into getting a better deal with a little extra effort.

no shite. Im about to piss my wife off getting into this smart stuff. Which is WHY I'm getting into this smart stuff.

Also, are these hues ambiant dimmable (with a normal switch like a normal house) or do you have to dim with app/hub?

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Also, are these hues ambiant dimmable (with a normal switch like a normal house) or do you have to dim with app/hub?

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The Hue/bridge combination work differently than typical dimmable LEDs. A typical dimmable LED works in tandem with the dimmer switch that drives the bulb. The Hue bulb, instead, contains all of the dimming circuitry, radios, power conversion, etc. in the base of the bulb itself and simply needs standard 110VAC feeding into it to run it. The Hue bridge then tells the bulb what to do and the electronics in the bulb does it. The Hue dimmer switch (sold separately) is just a radio that sends the command to the lighting system to dim or brighten when you push the buttons.

Right now, for about the same price as one Hue dimmer switch for each room you'd want to dim (i.e. bedrooms and living area) you can get an Echo Dot or Home Mini and integrate them with the Hue bridge then just TELL the lights to dim all over the house or in certain rooms or even single bulbs, set up schedules, set up scenes, play Jeopardy, etc.

EDIT: Not completely unrelated, but not tech per se. If you're not looking to hardwire the power to the fixtures, accidental flipping of the switch can be a pain in the arse. There are switch protectors to keep your switches in the on position that mount using the screws on the faceplate, but they're kinda ugly and a pain if you want to remove them and reinstall. I stumbled across this product that's actually made for Orthodox Jews to protect their switches on the Sabbath so they don't inadvertently operate them. They use magnets to mount to the screws on the faceplate and are easily removable. They make them for the large flat paddle type switches as well. The brand I found was Mitzvah Family, though I'm sure there are others.

Yep you get false positives that way. Try adding hue to your search string.

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Are you saying I wouldnt need a dimmer if I have an echo/echo dot in the room?

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Correct.

The Hue bridge and bulbs have dimming capability built in on their own. All you have to do to dim the bulbs is to have a way to tell the Hue bridge you want the bulbs dimmed. Philips provides this capability out of the box with only the bridge, the bulbs, and the Hue app on your smart phone. The dimmer switch is just a way to command the bridge with a separate piece of hardware if you don't want to pull out your phone every time you want to change your lights. However, both the Echo and Google Home will integrate with the Hue system and provide full speak-to-control capabilities to the Hue system giving you complete control of the entire lighting system (not just those lights physically near the Echo or Google Home) as long as there is an Echo or Google Home that can hear your command and is able to communicate with the Hue bridge.

For instance, the Echo has a Hue skill that Alexa can use. This skill allows Alexa to connect to and control the Hue bridge wirelessly. Now, the way the Hue system is structured is to basically group a number of individual bulbs into "rooms" that are controlled as a unit. So, for instance, I have a table lamp that is its own "room", two bulbs over a kitchen island that are their own "room", and two bulbs in a dining area that are their own "room". The main living area of my house is an open floor plan, so all three of these groups are in the same physical room of the house. Alexa provides further abilities to collect these Hue "rooms" into a cascading hierarchy of groups. So, in Alexa, I have all of the lights in the main living area (lamp, island, dining) banded together in a group called "living area".

So, with the Echos, I can be in my bedroom and say "Alexa, set the living area to 100 percent" and the bulbs in the lamp, over the kitchen island, and in the dining area come on at their maximum brightness. I can set up a scene (basically, you set all of the individual colors and brightnesses of all the bulbs in a room up once and save those settings for later recall as a "scene") called "movie lighting" that turns everything down to 10% lighting and a soft red. Then, when I want to watch a movie, I can simply trigger my preferred lighting setup by saying "Alexa, turn on movie lighting". At any level of the hierarchy (bulb, room, group), you can control every device that is contained in that level through Alexa with similar commands. So, I can say "Alexa, turn kitchen bulb one to 100%" and the left bulb over the kitchen island turns to full brightness and the right bulb doesn't change its state. If I say "Alexa, turn the kitchen to 50%", both bulbs over the island are set to 50% brightness. If I say "Alexa, turn the living room off", the lamp, the kitchen island, and the dining area bulbs are all turned off. It took a little setting up but once it's set up, it's set up, and the lighting in the whole house is easily voice controlled from any place Alexa can hear me.

Essentially, an Echo or a Google Home can completely replace all other methods for controlling a Hue lighting system, as well as pretty much any device in a home that can communicate using a home automation communication protocol. So, going back to that movie lighting example, if you had smart shades, a Logitech Harmony, a Hue system, and a Google Home or Echo, you could give a single command and the Blu-Ray player would be turned on, the TV turned on and set to the proper input, the audio system turned on and set to the proper input and surround sound setting, the shades lowered, and the lights set for dim ambiance.

Yep, Harmony should allow you to control pretty much your entire A/V system with the one remote control. The Echos and Google Home in turn would integrate with the Harmony similar to how they integrate with the Philips Hue system and provide the ability to control the Harmony by voice and just get rid of the remote controls all together.

The Echos and the Google Home basically provide the single point of voice control of all of these devices individually. With some third party scripting apps like Stringify, you can finely control many devices by having Alexa trigger a script based on a single voice command. Do you want Alexa to turn on your TV and set it to the cable input, turn on your cable box and change it to ESPN, turn on your audio receiver and set it to the cable input and then change the audio filters to stadium mode, close the blinds, and turn on your lighting to a purple and gold color scheme when you say "Alexa, LSU is on"? That can be done. You can set up Alexa to trigger a Stringify flow (what they call a script). That Stringify flow, in turn would then directly command all the different devices to do what you want. Echo or Home, in this case, would simply provide the voice trigger to set that flow off and the actual control of the devices would come from Stringify.

Do you want it to do that automatically without even having to get Alexa in the loop? IFTTT (If this, then that) allows you to take a bewildering number of inputs and triggers (the "if this" part) and when they occur, perform a bewildering number of commands on different devices and services (the "then that" part). So, once you have the Stringify flow set up that Alexa is able to trigger on the command "Alexa, LSU is on", you can take that exact same Stringify flow and have IFTTT automatically start it when ESPN's hook into IFTTT notifies it that an LSU football game is starting. If you prefer, IFTTT itself can directly control the devices if you don't need scripting capabilities and just want a single action to automatically occur on a single event. You want your desk lamp and only your desk lamp to turn on a pale green when you've received an incoming email? IFTTT can do that.

In summary:

-Each device or hub controls its own hardware. The Hue bridge controls the lights. The Harmony controls the A/V system. The SmartThings hub can control other generic H/A devices.
-Echo or Home provides the integration and voice command capabilities to control those individual hubs and third party apps like IFTTT and Stringify
-IFTTT provides a second means of integration and control that doesn't necessarily even have to involve Alexa or Google Home, but can provide control of your devices based on an ever expanding selection of other inputs for a deeper level of customizable automation
-Stringify provides a third means of integration and control, again not necessarily involving Alexa or Google Home, that gives you the capability to perform many different actions on many different control devices all wrapped up in a single script
-All of these hubs and control methods talk to each other and together provide some pretty powerful ways to control your home automation.

I fear we've gotten off topic on sale lighting here. I wish we had a home automation sticky. Some people are willing to spend thousands of dollars and hours of preparation to sit in the cold rain in the woods and maybe kill a deer. I'm willing to spend thousands of dollars and hours of preparation to control my house by voice and definitely eat a porterhouse.

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Will this hue hub need to be centered in the house to be able to control the entire house?

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Nope.

The bulbs have their own transceivers in them and the bulbs and the bridge form their own separate mesh network for communications. So, if you have a bulb on the far end of the house that can't make a connection to the Hue bridge, the communication from that bulb to the bridge will be routed from room to room through intermediate bulbs. So, as long as the bridge can talk to one bulb, it can talk to every bulb that's in the same mesh as that one bulb and as long as one individual bulb can talk to any single bulb on the mesh network, it can talk to the bridge that is connected to the mesh. Direct point-to-point communication is not required for the bridge to control a bulb, however, a single mesh network must exist for a single bridge to run an entire house (up to 50 lamps or Hue devices, I think). If you have a situation where one group of bulbs cannot talk to another group of bulbs or more than 50 devices, you'll probably need an additional bridge, but that's a LOT of devices for one home.

The Hue bridge can be situated anywhere it can be connected to your router with a CAT5 cable and has a power outlet. The router provides the link between the Hue bridge and Home/Echos, the Hue app on your smartphone, dimmers, third party apps, etc.