Hampton Bay Landscape Floodlight review: Home Depot is learning

Home Depot continues to fill in its Hubspace smart home ecosystem with new devices, and the latest one we’ve had in house is its Hampton Bay Landscape Floodlight, a complementary cousin to the Hampton Bay Landscape Spotlights I reviewed around this time in 2023.

Note the singular versus plural forms there. Whereas the spotlights are available as a 3-pack, now selling for $129 compared to their $149 price last year ($50 singly), the floodlight is sold in quantities of one for $65.

Design & features

Like the spotlights, this floodlight is a hardwired, low-voltage model that requires a transformer (I tested it with the same $100 Hampton Bay Hubspace smart transformer I used for the other review). Both the floodlight and the transformer connect to your 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network and can be controlled with the Hubspace app. The presence of a Wi-Fi adapter in the floodlight itself gives you the option of using your existing “dumb” transformer, if you have one (or if you don’t, you could buy a less-expensive “dumb” transformer).

I recommend using the Hubspace model, however, because it will consume less power. You can schedule it to turn on and off according to a schedule, so it’s not wasting electricity in the daytime. The transformer can handle three independent wired channels and a maximum load of 200 watts (the floodlight consumes 10 watts).

Michael Brown/Foundry

As do the spotlights, the floodlight produces both white and colored light (more details in a bit). As you’d expect, the floodlight produces a much wider beam of light than the spotlight. It’s also brighter, producing up to 650 lumens of brightness compared to 450 lumens (each) for the spotlights (both products are dimmable). Perhaps more importantly, it seems Home Depot learned a lesson in material strength since it began manufacturing those spotlights.

Where the spotlights have copious amounts of fragile plastic in their housings—and I promptly shattered one because I didn’t follow the installation instructions to the letter—the floodlight’s housing is fabricated entirely from aluminum (both lights have glass lenses). Both models come with an aluminum stake for each light if you want to stick them in the ground, but you can also mount the floodlight to a wall or fence.

Installation and setup

If you don’t already have a transformer and wiring in place, you’ll need to buy those components, because they don’t come with the floodlight. I used a 75-foot roll of Cerrowire 16/2 low-voltage wire ($28) and, as I mentioned earlier, Home Depot’s Hampton Bay smart transformer ($100). If you want the gory details on what the transformer can do and the differences between wire gauges, take a look at my Hampton Bay Landscape Spotlight review.

As with the spotlights, the floodlight has a stub cable ending in a block that you’ll pull apart and then sandwich the wire leading back to the transformer between the two pieces. A set of teeth in the block pierce the wire’s jacket to make an electrical connection. Home Depot recommends wrapping this block in electrical wire for waterproofing, but I never got around to doing that with the spotlights and haven’t had any problems.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Once you have the hardware configured, you’ll install the Hubspace app on your smartphone (it’s available for Android and iOS), click the “+” sign in the app, select Add Product, and scan the QR code on the floodlight. If you have multiple lights, you can create Rooms and Groups and organize them by location (e.g., Backyard, etc.) or any other way you’d like. All the lights in a Group can be turned on and off at once. Oddly, however, you cannot schedule groups, only individual lights.

Day-to-day use

Michael Brown/Foundry

Getting back to the lighting, you can use a slider in the Hubspace app to dim or brighten the floodlight, and you can change the color temperature of its white light from a relatively warm 3100 Kelvin to a very cool 6000K. Three presets are available at 3000-, 3500-, 4000-, and 5000K.

The light can also cast colored light from a palette of 16 million, but you’ll take a hit in brightness. Don’t expect it to wash any landscape feature in color. The best you can expect is a spot of color from the light itself, unless the floodlight is extremely close to something, like a birdbath, sculpture, or the side of your house.

You can select colors by dragging your finger on a color wheel, and you can use 12 presets to save your favorite hues. The app also lets you play with color-changing lighting patterns for holidays and “moods” (e.g., “Dinner Party,” “Valentines Day,” and “Rainbow”), each with variable brightness levels and adjustable transition speeds.

Michael Brown/Foundry

You can schedule the floodlight to turn on and off according to schedules, including on at sunset and off at sunrise, and there are three power-on behaviors that determine how the light will behave following a power failure. Default Mode powers the light on with whatever settings it was at prior to the power failure. Protect Sleep Mode keeps the light at whatever setting it was at before the power failure (if it was off, it will remain off when power is restored). SafetyMode will turn the light on at its default setting or preset when power is restored.

Hubspace products are also compatible with the Amazon Alexa and Google Home ecosystems, so you can use voice commands to turn them on and off, but you can’t incorporate them into your Apple Home setup if you have one. They’re also not Matter certified. I don’t count that as a significant drawback, but you might have other ideas.

Should you buy the Hampton Bay Landscape Floodlight?

As with Home Depot’s landscape spotlights, its smart floodlight costs a fraction of something like a Philips Hue Lily XL ($159.99, plus the cost of a power supply and a Bridge, if you don’t already have those items). But Philips lighting products are much more flexible to deploy, its app is more sophisticated, and if you’re already using Philips Hue lights inside your home, you’ll want to stay in the same ecosystem.

But the same goes for people with other Hubspace products. Home Depot’s ecosystem is growing, and the company is doing a good job of supporting it, so I have no reservations about its longevity. This entry in its landscape lighting product line features considerably more robust construction than its spotlight, too.

Bottom line: The Hampton Bay Landscape Floodlight is a great product for highlighting features in your home’s landscaping.

Specifications

• Maximum brightness: 650 lumens, 75-watt equivalent (white light)
• Maximum power consumption: 10 watts
• Materials: Aluminum housing and stake, glass lens
• Weatherization: Rated IP65 (impervious to dust, protected against water jets from any direction)
• Dimensions: 12.4 x 4.9 inches (HxW), with x 3.27-inch wire
• Supported smart home ecosystems: Alexa, Google Assistant, Hubspace
• Warranty: 5 years