Govee Uplighter Floor Lamp Review

Govee Upright Floor Lamp: Introduction

• Lighting type: Smart floor lamp with 3 lighting zones
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
• Ecosystem: Matter, Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, SmartThings, etc.

Back in June, Govee took the covers off three unique new smart lamps, and the Chinese brand’s new floor lamp series consists of three different models, designed to do more than regular lamps.

The Trussière, Tree, and Uplighter floor lamps are meant to transform your walls and ceilings into a mood-setting light show. It is the latter that we will review here.

The Govee Uplighter floor lamp lives up to its fleshy name and is a triple threat with a ripple-lit top that faces the ceiling, a decorative RGBIC strip in the middle, and a bottom lamp that emits 1000 lumens of white light for task lighting.

As we’ve seen with previous smart lights from the brand, such as the Strip Light 2, the Uplighter is compatible with Matter using Matter-over-WiFi.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been lighting my office with a Govee Uplighter floor lamp. Read on for a detailed review.

design and build

The first thing you notice when you unbox the Uplighter is that it’s a large unit, and it’s packaged in a box like a robot vacuum.

It requires a little assembly first, but it’s incredibly easy, even for a DIY idiot like me.

The pole consists of four parts, connected by a main wire, like an elaborate smart light nunchaku.

Just screw these together, screw into the base, and screw the body onto the top.

There are also some buttons on the top pole. You can also adjust the color temperature by long pressing the on/off and scene switcher.

When you screw the bottom pole into the base, it leaves a gap underneath that you can run one of three different options depending on how you want to orient the cable towards the power socket.

It stands 1.7 meters tall when fully assembled. The cable only runs through the hollow pole and is not attached, so you can also remove part of the pole for a smaller light if you wish. The cable simply connects to the mains cable at the bottom and to the main unit at the top.

Speaking of which, the strange spacecraft at the top, which looks like a dome with a diameter of 28 cm and a thickness of 8 cm, is the main lighting unit, consisting of a 10-inch white ring downlight, a 5-inch ripple effect projector on the top, and an ambient color ring on the side.

It moves 60 degrees (30 degrees up / 30 degrees down), so you can adjust the lighting effect to the angle you want. You can see that the top is covered with corrugated plastic. This is used to create the Uplighter’s main effect.

Setup and apps

When you turn on the uplight for the first time, you’ll notice that the coloring on the side glows a pale pink color and the other lights glow a soft white color.

Adding the Uplighter to your smart home can be done in a few different ways: directly using the Matter QR code on the top of the pole, or via Bluetooth via the Govee app.

When I did the latter, the Govee app recognized the light without me having to do anything and asked me to add it to my setup.

Note that the Uplighter is 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi only, so you may need to temporarily disable 5 GHz on your router if you experience issues.

A key component of the Matter smart home system is that you don’t have to bother using a branded app if you don’t want to. Instead, you can control your devices through your smart home ecosystem, including Apple Home, SmartThings, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home.

I won’t go into too much detail about what exactly Matter is and what it means for your smart home. We have a very comprehensive guide and explanation on our Matter hub page.

However, to get the most out of the Uplighter, you’ll need to sync it with the Govee app, just like any other Govee smart light. This will unlock all the extra features and if you’re already using another Govee light like the Lyra floor lamp or neon rope light, you’ll know exactly what to expect.

Also, after the initial setup, you can retrieve Matter codes at any time from within the Govee app and sync them across other smart home systems.

The good news is that the Govee app has been significantly improved and improved over the past 18 months or so, making it much easier to use.

It’s still very busy and the overwhelming number of options on offer can still be a bit overwhelming, especially for beginners, but it’s now much less clunky and much easier to navigate than before.

The Scenes tab has a number of different lighting effects categorized under headings such as Funny, Festival, Natural, and Life. Approximately 100 pieces are available.

The Govee app has built-in AI bots that can chat and send text messages to create personalized lighting effects. Think “campfire in the woods,” “midnight sea,” or “dog party in black and white,” and the bot uses the smarts of AI to match user prompts to lighting effects.

I found that I could pretty much achieve the vibe I was looking for by keeping it relatively simple.

If you don’t already have an effect you like, you can customize it to your heart’s content in the DIY section. You can also share your own designs with the Govee community or use designs created by others

performance

As for Uplighter’s performance, well… there’s a lot going on here.

Let’s start with the headliner, the ripple effect upright. At first glance, it’s a pretty smooth ceiling show. Think of RGB waves gliding over a room, as if someone bottled up a pool’s reflection and told it to vibrate.

But take a closer look, or tweak the colors in the Govee app, and you quickly hit frustrating limits.

I think Govee’s color mixing talent is the best in the industry, but there’s no RGBWW light beads or color blending algorithm action on display here at all.

Instead, upward-firing projectors use individual red, green, and blue LEDs that rotate under a fixed plastic prism. Doing so will create a ripple effect. It involves actual body movements.

But it also means that you can’t blend the colors as you would expect. If you choose purple, you will not get a smooth shade. Red waves and blue waves overlap. This is true for anything on the yellow (red and green), cyan (green and blue), or orange spectrum. Technically they’re all there, but the colors don’t actually mix, they just coexist.

It’s not bad, and the effect is incredibly beautiful and dynamic, but given what Govee usually does when blending lights, I would have liked a little more.

The prism is also constantly active and there is no way to completely disable the effect, so it is not possible to shine a fixed light upwards. You can slow it down and stop it, but it will still get stuck in the wavy pattern.

As for the ambient side rings, they basically glow in a single color that can be set independently.

The downlighter is a 10-inch white-only ring that emits cool to warm colors with a color temperature of 2700-6500k, producing a powerful, even light that is perfect as a regular lamp. There are no gimmicks or ripples here. Provides solid task lighting when you need it. It’s also plenty bright at 1000 lumens.

The room I was testing the Uplighter in had fairly low ceilings, about 7 feet, so its effectiveness was quite limited, and the wash area above it was only about 2 meters wide.

However, I removed some of the poles to recreate a higher ceiling and it created a nice effect throughout the room. So think about where you will use Uplighter. Rooms with high ceilings definitely have more benefits.

There’s also a dynamic music mode where the lights pulsate and react to songs in sync with other Govee lights, using the built-in microphone or directly from your phone’s music, creating a vibrant atmosphere, perfect for parties or simply enhancing your audio-visual experience.

final thoughts

Uplighter is classic Govee: bold, bright, and a little quirky. From the giant spaceship-like dome to the swirling RGB waves bouncing off the ceiling, there’s nothing subtle about it. This is a smart floor lamp that tries to be more than just a floor lamp, and in many ways it does.

However, the mechanical limitations of ripple projectors prevent this. There’s no actual color mixing, no ability to turn off effects completely, and no white/color combinations unless you come across a suitable preset scene. For a brand that usually values ​​flexibility, this one feels unusually fixed.

Still, if you want a statement lamp that’s also a conversation starter, it can help. Literally just give it room to shine. The more ceiling space you have, the greater the return.

Test method

When we publish a review, you can rest assured that it is the result of long-term testing.

Smart lights typically exist within an ecosystem, or perhaps a set of products that all work in harmony. Therefore, it is impossible to use connected lights for a week and make a judgment.

We test smart home kits all day, every day, so we know what’s important and how a particular light compares to the alternatives you’re considering.

Our reviews are comprehensive, objective and unbiased, and of course we don’t receive direct compensation to review devices.

For more information, read our guide on how to test smart lights.