REVIEW – Home lighting continues to encourage companies to innovate and bring new products to market. LEDs are taking over the lighting market, due to their flexibility, long life, and low energy requirements. I have quite a few LEDs in my home and have been adding more to the new home I am updating prior to my moving in. I was recently sent a floor lamp to test, the AiDot Mujoy RGBWW Smart Dual-Bar Corner Floor Lamp, to be precise, and am ready to report.
The AiDot Mujoy RGBWW Smart Dual-Bar Corner Floor Lamp is a programmable LED floor lamp with two rows of LEDs in tall “wands” that can be adjusted. Light Controller
From website and in-box materials
The AiDot Mujoy RGBWW Smart Dual-Bar Corner Floor Lamp consists of a heavy base with two 5’ tall slender (1” diameter) wands rising from metal sockets that are attached to the flat base via a ball-and-socket joint. In this way, the wands can be moved through a fairly decent range of about 35º off perpendicular.
A white medium-gauge wire 36” long with a USB-C connector comes out of the 11” x 6” base. There is a 4” three-button oval controller that accepts this plug into one end, which has an 18” wire running out the other end. The wall wart has a 48” cord that accepts the round pin-type connector from that. The entire lamp is made from a silvery metal (aluminum?), with the exception of the LED strands, which are molded from heavy white silicon. They are very malleable and hold onto the channels in the wands without issue.
The AiDot Mujoy RGBWW Smart Dual-Bar Corner Floor Lamp arrives in a box that’s about 17” x 8” x 8”. It is nicely packed inside several layers of open-cell styrofoam that is form-fitted (or cut to size – hard to tell) for each piece. The styrofoam is not the kind that degrades into those little tapioca beads, but more like what you’d get for moving glassware long-distance. The lamp comes completely unassembled. There are four pieces to each of the wands, the lighting strips, a base, a controller, and a power supply. No tools are provided or, really needed. There is a decent instructional assembly video linked from the instruction papers. There are eight extruded aluminum semi-round pieces (4 each) for the “wands”. (I wasn’t sure what to call these things, so that’s the term I’m going with.) The base and top are different, but the two pieces in the center are identical. All pieces are clearly marked and very easy to assemble.
Once they are complete, the lowest section needs to be inserted into the base joint, but you’ll need to make sure to bring the tiny, thin wiring harness up through the hole in the wand. (This is not easy. Swear words help somewhat.) Once the wands are friction fitted into the base joints, (I call them joints, because they rotate from side to side – more on this later.) you’ll need to plug the lighting strip into the tiny harness.
This is fairly easy to do if you’re working on a table. (Remember, these wands are five feet long. Maintain situational awareness at all times. There are fans, drinks, and dogs to consider, as well as the ceiling.) Once you have the first one connected, work the lower end of the LED assembly into the wand channels, but make sure the wiring harness is fed back into the innards of the joint/wand area. (This is hard to explain, but, trust me, it’s even harder to do!) Once you have an inch or two smoothly inserted, go to the other end of the wand and work the top of the lighting strip into the wand’s channels, then work down. See the above warning regarding situational awareness. A word of caution: the wands are not weight-bearing. As in, you CANNOT pick the unit up with the long, handle-looking thing that is right there at torso height. You have to pick the base up from the table, place it on the floor, work with the top area of the wand, work things down to the base area, and then repeat with the other wand. I would move it to the final destination at this point – carrying it by the base only. Watch those door jambs.
Once both are fully set into the wand, plug the two pieces of the wall socket and controller together, and you’re ready to pair.
The app is typical of most IoT connections: make an account, put the unit into pairing mode, pair, enter your WiFi password, name the device, and put it into a virtual room. Sadly, this unit doesn’t work with Matter or HomeKit. They claim it works with Alexa, but I have no Alexa units to test it with. (I have issues with Amazon’s Alexa division’s trustworthiness, but that’s just me.) There’s a section on the AiDot website for Matter devices, so it’s on their RADAR, just not in this device currently.
Once the AiDot Mujoy RGBWW Smart Dual-Bar Corner Floor Lamp is fully assembled and connected, you can change colors, create patterns of lights, have it react to music, set timers to turn it off or on at certain times of the day – all the things you’d expect to do with an IoT lighting system. The light from the two wands is even and washes over a wall nicely. The two wands can be rotated independently, as well as set to an angle from the base in any direction about 35º from perpendicular to the floor. This makes for a very flexible light source.
It should be obvious by now that I have some serious hesitation in recommending this product. It performs well enough, but if you ever want to move it to another room, I can guarantee someone is going to grab it by the wands, and that base is just going to stay in place while they walk off with them. (This is the voice of experience. The first one I was sent, I had an issue connecting the wires. I decided to move it to another room to test and picked up the two wands to carry it into the next room. Boom! Almost hit my toe as the base fell off, stripping the wire out of the harness. I tried to fix it, but they wound up having to send me a second unit. Product reviewing is not a walk in the park, folks!)
Here’s how I’d fix it: make a piece to fit at the end of the wand that plugs into the base joint with a more robust wiring connector. Have a threaded collar on this piece that, once the wires are connected and the wand inserted into the joint, you can screw onto the top of the joint. It’s poor interface design to have something that is this tedious to put together and cannot bear the weight of the whole device. I have had many other floor lamps, and have never once even thought about picking one up by the base. When I was a kid, we had a floor lamp that had a wooden bucket on the base for magazines. (Don’t judge. Early American design was popular in the ’60s. Everything was wood!) It was very heavy when full, but we would always just grab the upright to pick it up and move it when vacuuming.
I’m moving into a new home, and several of the rooms have no overhead lights, relying instead on outlets controlled by a switch. While I’m not a fan of this design, (especially since the room then can’t have a ceiling fan, which in this part of the South is almost more important than air conditioning!) there’s no attic space to easily add it, so here we are.
I’m excited to use the AiDot Mujoy RGBWW Smart Dual-Bar Corner Floor Lamp as the light that comes on when you flip the wall switch in one of my public rooms. (I’m still not sure what to call this room or what is going in there. Right now, it’s my bike-and-scooter garage!) Other reviewers called out the LEDs being too few and too far apart, such that you could see the individual lights, but this didn’t bother me. I like that it comes back on to the same setting after I turn off the outlet, even though it does a little light show while warming up and finding the network.
But it’s all in the same color and intensity, which is fine by me. Once I’m sleeping here, I may try out the timer function in the main bedroom. If I do, I’ll post an update.
Price: $189.00 Where to buy: Company Webstore and Amazon Source: The sample of this product was provided by AiDot.
I just wanted to mention that the price on Amazon is $140 ($139.99) and there is a 40% off coupon bringing it down to $84.
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