Smart home devices seems to be all the rage and I for one love them! I have a range of connected devices all over the house, they let me know the latest news on a morning, turn on and tune in my TV to a certain channel, alert me of people at my door, detect motion when I’m away from my home or the office.
So when I recently discovered a new smart home device company called Hej I decided to give a few of their connected lights a go.
Hej seems to be a Korean manufacturer of smart devices ranging from lights, cameras and a range of sensors that can control a range of dumb devices that can be turned ‘smart’. I purchased their LED strip kit for around $45 and a smart bulb for $19, they guaranteed next day arrival if ordered before 1pm.
The LED strip kit comes with a 2 meter light cable, a power pack, WiFi connection hub and instruction manual. Installation is simple, pick the location, peel of the 3M backed double sided tape and stick on your chosen surface, install the hub to the cable and plug in, if you’ve done everything correctly then the LED cable should light up.
The only thing that I feel that lets the whole process down is the app, it is available for iOS and Android, however it isn’t very user friendly and connecting up to my WiFi took a few attempts. This isn’t my first time installing smart devices, I’ve used a range of Phillips, Xiaomi and Yee, and had no problem with them. This one though left me a little frustrated and didn’t really confirm if it had connected or not, I had to logon to my router to see if it had.
My main goal of purchasing this Hej smart LED kit was to actually use it with Alexa and Google Assistant as I’d seen that it had advertised that it could work with a range of Smart Home services, Korean and Western ones. So I only really needed to use the Hej app to do my first install and then add them to Alexa and Google and use voice commands from then on.
Adding the Hej devices to Google and Alexa, isn’t as straight forward as I feel it should be and I do think that this could be a major let down for the company as the items are very well manufactured and are at a good price. I should note they seem to be having a sale on the items, however this sale has gone on for along time now and I think they just use this ‘sale’ as a marketing tactic.
Adding the devices to Alexa or Google requires you to either install a skill and you have to uninstall the skill each time you add a new device and then reinstall the skill for the device to be shown on your Alexa or for Google you do need to reauthorize connection from your Hej account to Google Home again.
With all that said I do think the devices work well and I will most likely be buying more. The one thing that I have discovered though is for the door and temperature sensors you do need to purchase a gateway device for them to work, so it could start to add up in price. Overall though if they work out the app issues I think they could compete with other smart home kits.