Colin Norris
The old style Lumie Bodyclock Starter was supplied fitted with a 42W E14 halogen bulb.
It's a bulb within a bulb as you can see:
There are obvious downsides to that:
- It's very inefficient by modern standards. This device would get scary hot in operation.
- Bulbs like this die eventually - the filament just breaks eventually. Mine is broken in the image above.
- These old glass bulbs are so fragile that people would complain that the product's bulb was broken before they even opened the box.
- You can't actually get replacements - halogen bulbs are banned in the UK now. You can still find old stock for sale from small indepedent shops, but they're not meant to be sold as far as I know.
- The whitest light you can get from one of these is still pretty yellow. And a light to get you woken up should be a very white, bluish light I believe.
It seems obvious to replace this with an LED bulb, but I doubt that would work as you'd hope. The point of these devices is to slowly brighten the bulb in the morning and to dim the bulb in the evening. I expect it's using a triac. My guess is that it would probably kind of work if you found an LED bulb compatible with old style dimmer switches but I thought this would be a good opportunity to solve all of the problems above in one go.
Plus I wanted to address another annoying weakness: this Lumie requires you to manually set it every night so it comes on the following morning. I want it to be automatic and to have a different time for the weekend.
To replace the halogen bulb, I chose a Philips WiZ LED C37 Colour Smart Light Bulb E14 4.9W smart bulb. I got mine for £12.74 from Toolstation. These don't need a special hub device - they just connect to Wi-Fi.
This bulb has an app that runs on your phone and lets you schedule a wake-up effect that actually turns a blu-ish white by the end, and you can set a different schedule for the weekend. That isn't compatible with dimmer switches - but it can dim itself.
To power it, I simply bypassed the original dimmer circuit in the lamp, allowing the new bulb to be powered directly from the mains. The keys on the front of the device can no longer control the bulb but it doesn't matter because your phone can do it if you ever want to control it manualy. The clock still works because it's just a clock, and if you really want to, I guess you can still use the device's horrific buzzer alarm.
So yes this "hack" is to change a light bulb and power it normally, I'm sorry if you expected something clever.
There is a perceivable hot spot in the diffuser now where the bulb is closer to it, but it doesn't bother me. The device works better than ever, I didn't have to throw it out and it was a quick and cheap fix. I've posted this project so if anyone else has one of these, they too can save it from landfill.
