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Hey what’s up, Alex here! Tuya smart life
products are one of the most common and popular smart home products because they are generally
much cheaper. They have probably the largest range of products, you have smart sockets,
switches, all sorts of lighting, sensors, door locks, kitchen appliances, over 2000
product categories. And the reason why they are able to scale this big is because they
are going with an OEM business model. This means that Tuya don’t actually manufacture
any of the actual hardware of the products, they only provide the components to make the
product smart. That will include things like the chip module that is going to be installed
onto the physical device itself, as well as providing the SDK and API to use their mobile
app and connecting to other integration services, basically all the software components Tuya
will provide, hardware side they don’t really care.

My issue with Tuya products is not because
of security and privacy reasons where you are hooking on to their cloud services instead
of local automation. My main concern is the hardware side of things where you can find
absolutely dirt cheap products with bad quality and not working well in my experience. Ok so back to the question, should you then
buy Tuya smart life products? My answer is a yes and no. No if it’s like totally brandless
or from some random unknown companies, most of which are from China. I will instead recommend going
for those local companies which have things like IMDA approval, various certification
test standards which are going to give you a better quality assurance and have warranty
support. So I have reached out to 3 companies that sell products based on the Tuya Smart
life platform. For the rest of the video, I will be showcasing and going through with you some
of the products that these companies sell At the end of this video, I will be giving
away every single one of these products that you see over here, so do watch till the end to find out
the details for the giveaway.

My main objective is to let more people have a chance to
try out some smart home products and at the same time also show some support for these
local companies as well. i think this is the biggest giveaway I ever did, I think we have over
$1500 worth of products over here. Ok let’s get started First company I like to share is Near. A lot
of products from them, I have mostly their smart lighting products here, various types
like downlights, smart bulbs, LED strips. And a couple of other types of devices like camera, IR blaster Looking at the packaging you will find that
all of their products have this label printed ‘complies with IMDA standards’ and a 2
year warranty for them.

Products that have an AC adaptor have a safety mark label and
this huge surface lamp has the safety mark as well. These are the kind of things I said
that will give you more quality assurance on Tuya products. Ok so let’s unbox and take a look at this
surface lamp first. This is a wifi device, 28W and 3100 lumens. Not RGB but you will
be able to adjust the color temperature and brightness on the app. Size of this is 400mm.
I won’t be fixing this up, just going to show roughly how it looks on the ceiling,
same for these recessed downlight I won’t be setting up them since I don’t have a
false ceiling at home. These are 6 inches, 12W with 900 lumens. Material quality wise,
they are all pretty decent. The best use of these smart downlights is to cover away the
dumb switch and pair them with a wireless switch.
Over here I have 2 different light strips.

This one is 2M long, able to extend up to
10M, the whole strip can only have 1 color at a time. The other one is 5M, don’t think
it can be further extended, this you will be able to configure different color at different
zones. The LED for the multicolor one is a little bit more space apart compared to the
single color strip.

A couple of smart bulbs here. I have the standard E27, 9W 950 lumens,
with RGB. Then a E14, 5W 400 lumens with RGB as well. Ok besides lighting products, this
is their smart plug, squarish shape with the power button at the left side. And this is
their IR blaster with a built in temperature and humidity sensor. This is really small,
specs of this indicate a range of less than 10m.

Let’s test this on my fan, tv and AC,
and they all work perfectly fine as per expected. Last item I have here is a Pan/tilt IP camera.
1080P with motion sensor and night vision. You can mount this on the ceiling with the
mini usb cable hidden. Best to pair with the smart plug to control the on or off power. Ok, I like to talk a little bit about their
app. Near did some changes on the devices page where they have included a picture for
every of their products inside. This is very helpful especially when you are trying to
add a new device as compared to the default smart life app.

One thing I notice they added
is the integration to smartThings which is something I don’t commonly see from other
Tuya branded companies. If I pull out my smartThings app and try to add a new device by brand,
you can find the Near app here. This means that I can easily set automation across different
brands. What I have shown you today is just a small fraction of their product catalogue,
their initial focus is mainly on lighting related products but now, they have so much
more variety. Another thing to mention about Near is they are one of the few focus partners
with Tuya. This means that they have direct access receiving priority support and also
the earliest to receive new updates and innovations from tuya. Next company here is from Home Auto. The products
that I got from them are mainly smart switches, wired and wireless, sensors and their zigbee
hubs. For me, I will always recommend to get zigbee as much as possible instead of wifi devices I have done the unboxing and here is a close
up look at all of them.

I have 3 color choices for the switches – black, silver and gold.
I requested for 1 gang and 2 gang switches, one for each of the colors. Their products
all come with the cybersecurity CSA labels on them, so you will know that at least these
comply with the basic security assurance. Let’s have a closer focus on the switches
to show you the design. Some of these have the home auto logo at the front top right
corner, while some have it at the side of the casing, I will definitely prefer it to
be at the side instead. There is a light indicator to tell you whether it’s on or off. This
is their zigbee hub or gateway, very small. Almost the same size as their motion sensor.
They also have switches for water heater, these are 20Amp and you will have additional
wiring for neutral. Lastly, a single gang wireless switch.

Alright I am going to quickly
set up these devices on their app. First of all, let’s wire up one of the switches to
show you all how they look. Please remember to switch off the main power for safety reasons,
this is super important. Since this is a single gang non neutral, you will only have 2 holes.
Just follow back your existing switch if you are unsure of how to do it. Screw back the
back plate then attach the front casing. Testing the switch and here is how the switch sounds… Going to put up all 3 different colors to show you how they look. Black always looks good with walnut, silver is ok too, gold not reallly for me, what you guys think? For the motion
sensor, it requires 3 triple A batteries and for the wireless switch is a CR2032, note
that batteries are not included in the packaging.

Over on the app, adding the zigbee hub first then
we can add all the zigbee devices to the hub. So this is how they all can work together.
Motion sensor to switch on the wall switch, and you can have the wireless switch to toggle
on or off anywhere you like. Home Auto is a company that focus more on
the distribution business supplying their products to other resellers. They are also
more into project implementation so you won’t be able to purchase their products directly
from their website. You could either reach out to their resellers or visit their showroom. If you are still not aware, you can use the
smart life app or any Tuya branded apps to add your devices since they all belong to
the tuya ecosystem. For example, instead of adding the zigbee gateway I got from home
auto inside the home auto app.

I can add it inside smart life instead, or even the Near
app. In other words, I can have the home auto motion sensor or wireless switch to trigger
the downlights from Near. So this is one benefit of going with Tuya products. One little tip
to find out whether a particular company is using the tuya products ecosystem is to simply
download their app and try to integrate it to google or smartThings for example. Then
during the authentication process it will prompt with a list for you to choose which
app do you want to link, if the app appears in this list means it’s under Tuya. Last company I like to share is called Möwe.
This is a german name with that special ö character, I was told to pronounce it as
‘mover’, m o v e r. They are selling mainly home appliances, I can’t believe that they actually sent me a robot vacuum here because this costs almost $700. There is also a smart kettle, and some
other devices like smart sockets and sensors.

In my previous video, I checked out the life
by city energy showroom. And over there, they are reselling many of the möwe products. Their
main focus business is on the smart kitchen appliances such as the hob and hood, and build
in oven. They look really good and very affordable, so I am actually planning to change away mine.
Besides those, they also have gas detector and smoke detector as well. These safety devices
are actually very important especially for the elderly, but many times overlooked. Similarly, their products have the ‘complies
with IMDA standards’ label, some have the cybersecurity CSA label, and some have the
safety mark certification on them depending on the product. The app that they are using
is call iAppliances. Alright, let’s check out the robot vacuum first. Actually, I quite
enjoy reviewing these robot vacuums. I have already checked out quite a number of them,
so I'm pretty familiar with what to look out for. This is the mop attachment with a 300ml
water tank, the internal dustbin is not on the robot vacuum itself but placed together
on this attachment.

Very surprised to find a remote control for a robot vacuum.
Packaging comes with 4 side brushes, 2 for the robot and 2 spare. The robot vacuum is
in black glossy. You can see the lidar sensor in the middle. There is no top cover since
the dust bin is at the side, if you want to do mopping then you can switch away the whole
thing to the mopping attachment. No cameras on the robot if you are concerned with privacy.
The main brush is your standard bristle brush with some rubber similar to the ones from
Ecovacs. Ok, I am not going to test out the vacuum because I don’t want to dirty it,
so let’s jump straight to take a look at the app features. Able to do spot, area or
room cleaning. You have setting for room partition, no go zones, able to change mop water level,
fan mode which is your vacuum suction power. Tapping options will bring you to additional
settings, can take a quick pause if you want to see what is there.

Alright let’s move
to the smart kettle. You have the safety mark for this. You have some controls and light
indicators at the front, you will see in a moment when I test this out. Capacity of this
is 1.7lites. Added the device on the app you will be able to set temperature, couple
of heating modes. Then you are able to set how long you want to keep the water warm.
Once set, you can start the process. On the app you can see the status, as well as on
the kettle with the temperature indicator, this is going to be super useful.
Next let’s quickly run through the remaining smart home products. We have light switches,
1 gang and 2 gang white in color. This is the zigbee hub. The motion sensor here which
you can easily turn and adjust where it is facing, the base is using magnet to hold the
whole thing together. A door window sensor pretty standard design. And lastly a smart
plug, switch on the left with red color led. Looking at these Tuya products and how Tuya
runs their business model now, somehow I think the Matter project definitely can learn something
from them.

By simplifying all the products and setting a standard for companies to easily
follow and adopt their platform. This is really a good way to eliminate all the smart home
complexity and compatibility problems making it less confusing for people to set up a smart
home. I can see a lot of people still don’t really
quite understand the basic concept when you ask questions like whether the tuya zigbee
hub can connect to aqara devices or vice versa.

And I also see people comment in my smart
home platforms video, asking like what about tuya smart life? Ok so I want to clear this up.
You can treat tuya smart life the same as ikea, aqara, philips hue, broadlink, switchbot,
so on and so forth. These products can only work within their own brand, their app don’t
allow you to add other brands of devices into them. Ok so you might say, the tuya smart
life platform can integrate with google and amazon, you can set it over there. Yes you
are right, then that makes google, amazon and smartThings, home assistant these are the
platforms to centrally manage your entire smart home because they can add other different
brands of devices into them, not tuya smart life. Hope we are clear on this.
Alright now for the giveaway announcement, as mentioned I am giving away every
one of these products here.

My purpose is to kind of promote more people to try out
home automation in Singapore, so this is only applicable for viewers staying in Singapore.
For each of these brands, there are 3 sets of giveaways, that makes a total of 9 lucky winners.
In the video description, there is a link to a google form. Simply just indicate which
giveaway set that you are most interested in getting, note that you can only choose one so choose
wisely. Then leave a LIKE and comment on this video, winners will be announced at the end
of my next video. That’s all from me today, thank you for watching and I will see you
in the next one, bye!.