Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights Review

Introduction

If your Christmas tree – or life – is missing a bit of colour, a set of smart string lights could be exactly what you need.

The Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights are ropes of 300 powerful LEDs, individually controllable for brightness and hue. They’re ideal for wrapping around a tree or other large Christmas decorations, or just for draping around your rooms or hallways to add some interest and colour.

As smart bulbs, these strings can connect to your Wi-Fi network, letting you use the Nanoleaf app for detailed control. You can integrate them in group scenes with other Nanoleaf devices, letting you build out comprehensive light shows.

However, the lights themselves are only IP44 rated, so they’re not suitable for uncovered outdoor use. It’s also worth pointing out these are simple point-source lights, rather than lanterns, so they’re best for concealing in trees, or anywhere else that disguises all the black wiring.

Design and Features

• Very long light strings allow for a choice of density
• Compatible with major smart home systems…
• …in theory

The Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights have a slightly unusual design. Rather than a single string, they’re split in two with a smart controller in the middle.

While the Twinkly Cluster I reviewed last winter offers a dense 400 bulbs in six metres of wire, the Smart String Lights’ zig-zag cabling helps you decide between density or length. The two strings stretch up to 12 metres each, but they can’t be cut or extended.

The smart controller has a smattering of buttons that let you turn the lights on and off, scroll through the stored lighting patterns, and turn the brightness up and down. Its box has IP67 weatherproofing, but the lights themselves only have IP44 protection. That’s fine for splashes, but not enough for persistent UK rain.

Having the controller in the middle of these lights could be an issue, depending where the plug socket you’re planning to use is. Scrolling patterns start at the tip of one string, propagating towards the tip of the second, so they progress in a linear fashion across the whole length of the device.

That’s ideal if you’re stretching the strings out in a line, but it might cause some head scratching if you want to get the perfect effect on a tree. Twinkly’s lights let you get around that with a visual mapping process that tells the controller where each bulb actually is; it’s a shame there’s no equivalent here.

Nanoleaf’s app is simple to use, although these lights are slightly fussy about Wi-Fi, supporting only 2.4GHz. I found it easy to add the light strings, after which the controls are intuitive – I’ll cover those more in a minute.

One significant issue is that you can only use the app to control the Smart Holiday String Lights from the same wireless network that they’re on. That means you won’t be able to turn them on or off from your mobile when you’re out – I don’t remember testing another smart product with that limitation.

The Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights support most of the major smart home platforms, including Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings and Matter. At least, they do in theory.

I was able to add and control them as a Matter device using my Flic hub and buttons. I couldn’t add them directly to Google Home or Alexa, as you need the relevant hub or Echo device – I didn’t have one available.

Normally you’d link a product’s app as a service to enable Home or Alexa to view and control it. In Home there’s only the Nanoleaf Smarter Series service, which doesn’t include these lights. In Alexa you’re asked if the lights are Matter compatible, sending you back to the need for an Echo device.

While it’s not essential to integrate with either system, they add broader automation support and would also be a way to control the lights from outside your Wi-Fi network.

Performance

• Brilliantly bright, saturated colours
• Excellent effects
• Can be flickery when cycling colours

I stuck with the Nanoleaf app for most of my tests. You can use it to manually turn the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights on and off and adjust their brightness. The Basic tab lets you choose from preset colours, or pick anything from a colour wheel.

You can also manually set the bulbs to white and pick their colour temperature. They don’t produce a particularly convincing cold white, though; you can see a slight rose tint, or each bulb’s red, green and blue LEDs, depending on the exact setting and how close you are. Here I’m comparing the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights (foreground) against the Twinkly Cluster (background).

There’s much more fun to be had on the Scene tab, which offers up a range of preset animations. A simple colour line above each gives a handy simplification of what it will look like. The default programmes range from slow fades like the rainbow-coloured Holiday Magic…

…through to the fast-chasing lights of Snow Day.

Some programs are driven by sound, as detected by the smart controller, which adds an interesting way to liven up a party. You can also create your own scene – either from scratch, or using a pre-defined list of palettes – but I had the most fun with the AI generator, which will build a pattern based on a simple text concept. This produced mixed results, from the surprisingly good ‘Popcorn’…

…through Ratatouille – now with added blue…

…to Northern Lights, which looked more like Iceland the shop than Iceland the country.

The app offers some other strong features, including the ability to effectively paint your own scene, download and use lots of other patterns, or set up smart routines. These let you schedule the lights on and off by time, or at sunset and sunrise.

Other than underwhelming pure whites, I was impressed by these bulbs’ brightness and colour intensity. They seemed about the equal of the Twinkly Cluster, which still adorns my bannisters, matching those bulbs for intensity and saturation.

I also liked the way the Smart Holiday String Lights’ zig-zag cable allowed me to bunch the bulbs up for greater density.

Most multicoloured lights show some stepping between shades and brightnesses, and the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights are no exception.

Here it’s particularly noticeable if you turn the brightness much below about 10%, with bulbs tending to take big strides between colour transitions. At brightnesses below 5%, the bulbs snap straight from one shade to the next, producing an interesting crackly light effect.

In use, these lights consumed a maximum of about 19 watts of electricity, about a third less than I saw from the Twinkly Cluster – although to be fair, that has about a third more bulbs. I was surprised that the Nanoleaf Smart Holiday String Lights’ controller barely seemed to get warm, although their power adaptor did a little.

Should you buy it?

FAQs