Installing Philips Hue bulbs is a great way to boost your lighting game, but since they heavily rely on an internet connection, you might be wary of going all in and blanketing your house with smart lights. The good news is that there isn't a whole lot to worry about---here's what happens whenever your Philips Hue lights go offline.
If Your Internet Goes Down
Since smart lights use an internet connection in order to make many of their features work, you may think that they become completely useless whenever your internet goes down. However, you only lose a bit of functionality when this happens.
If your Philips Hue lights lose their internet connection, you only lose the ability to control them from your smartphone when you're away from home. As long as the Hue Bridge hub is connected to your wireless router and your phone is connected to your home's Wi-Fi network, you'll still be able to control your lights from your phone, even if your internet connection is down.
Furthermore, as long as the hub is powered up, your Hue Dimmer Switches will still work as normal, even if you've customized these switches within a third-party app like iConnectHue.
If the Power Goes Out
As you can probably guess, if your power goes out in your home or apartment, your Philips Hue lights will go out with it. At that point, a smart light bulb is no more or less useful than a regular bulb---after all, regular bulbs would go out too.
However, when your power comes back on, every single one of your Hue light bulbs will turn back on, whether or not they were turned off at the time of the power outage. They'll also revert back to the default soft white color temperature, no matter the color state they were in when the power went out.
This means that if the power goes out in the middle of the night and turns back on, expect to be woken up by your Hue lights blinding you. Unfortunately, there's no way to prevent this from happening, but luckily, your power doesn't go out all that often anyway.
If the Hue Bridge Hub Completely Fails
It's rare that a Hue Bridge will crap out entirely, but there's always the possibility. When that happens, though, your Hue light bulbs basically become traditional light bulbs (albeit expensive ones).
Your next step is to just buy a new hub to replace the broken one, but you can still use Hue lights without a hub if you have a Hue Dimmer Switch (you may just have to re-pair them with the dimmer switch). Granted, you won't be able to change colors, switch to different scenes, or control them with Alexa, but you can at least turn your Hue lights on and off and even dim them to specific levels without needing a hub.
Of course, even that isn't really any different than using a regular light switch, but you can at least take the Hue Dimmer Switch with you around the house and mount it wherever you want, since it doesn't need to be wired into the wall.
In the end, your Hue lights aren't completely useless if your internet goes down or even if your Hue Bridge hub goes completely kaput, but as with any smarthome device, there are some things to keep in mind if something does go wrong with your Philips Hue system.