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Iris by Lowe's Second Generation review: Lowe's Iris focuses on the future, loses sight of the present
The second-generation Iris by Lowe's Smart Home system shows a lot of promise but doesn't feel finished.
Editors' Note, January 31st, 2019: Iris by Lowe's is shutting down with all service ending on March 31, 2019. The original review from 2016 remains below.
Iris by Lowe's Second Generation
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
On paper, Iris by Lowe's handled the transition from the first to the second generation of the company's smart home system well. Iris took note of the problems with generation one, and promised faster response time, easier device pairing, and more robust app controls. The company even offered existing customers a free upgrade to the $60 next-gen hub along with a migration tool to help with the transition.
Take a look at the comments in the iOS app store, in Google's Play store, or even on the new hub's page on Lowe's site (at the bottom of this page, too) and you'll notice lots of customers unhappy with the upgrade. The migration tool wasn't ready at launch, and the second-gen system wasn't fully compatible with all first gen devices. Lots of customization options were lost in translation. Many of these details have been added back in through updates since the second-gen launched in November, but customers who relied on a web interface instead of the app to interact with the system are still out of luck. Rightly, they're pissed.
Transition issues aside, Lowe's Iris generation two doesn't hold up on its own merits as a good smart-home system. It is more responsive, but using the app is tedious and counterintuitive. Some pieces of hardware don't work consistently. Worse, you still have to pay a $10 monthly fee just to use some of the basic features of the system. Wink, SmartThings and Insteon all have similar features for free, and all are a better buy than the second generation Lowe's Iris system right now.
What does Lowe's Iris work with?
For the review process, I primarily looked at the devices contained with the $130 Iris Automation Pack -- the hub, two contact sensors to detect when a door opens and closes, a smart outlet you can use to automate a lamp or anything else with a plug, a button you can map to rules or use as a panic button, and a motion sensor.
See also
The $60 hub has antennas for ZigBee, Z-Wave and Bluetooth wireless radios -- covering the bases for typical smart-home connection standards. In theory, Iris should be widely compatible with third party devices. You plug it into your router so you can control your devices from anywhere over Wi-Fi. And it uses four AA batteries as a backup in case power goes down -- Lowe's has on optional cellular backup plan for $5 a month so you can access the system even when your router is offline.
Other first party Lowe's devices include a garage door controller, a range extender, an indoor and outdoor camera, a keypad and a water sensor. The hub works with third party devices like GE plugs, First Alert smoke detectors, Honeywell thermostats, Osram lights and locks from Schlage, Yale, and Kwikset. In all, it's a lineup competitive with SmartThings, Wink, and Insteon. Though Wink and SmartThings get lots of additional interoperability via integration with IFTTT -- the online rule maker. Iris doesn't have that.
I primarily tested the $130 Automation Pack.
You can buy the Lowe's Iris hub, the Automation Pack, the $100 Security starter pack, and any other Lowe's Iris accessory, as well as a number of compatible third party devices now from Lowes.com and in Lowe's retail outlets.
Lowe's Iris only officially supports the US, but according to the company, does have customers using the system overseas. The price of the hub converts to approximately £40 and AU$80 for our readers in the UK and Australia respectively. The $130 Automation Pack converts to £90 and AU$170. The $100 Security pack costs roughly £70 and AU$130.
What can you do with Lowe's Iris?
With the first generation, we were annoyed by how little you could do with the app. For the most part, you needed to control the system with the Web interface. That isn't a problem anymore. Anything you control with Lowe's Iris, you control via the app. In fact, now the Web interface is bare-bones. You can use it to manage your billing, though Iris Vice President Mick Koster promised that core services are coming back to the web later this year.
Between rules, schedules, scenes, and managing alerts and alarms, you can do a lot with the app to make your Lowe's Iris smart home pretty smart. For instance, the hub comes with a built-in alarm, and you can set up your motion sensor or contact sensor to trigger the alarm and send you a push notification when the system is armed. Unfortunately, a lot of this functionality sits behind a paywall. By comparison, with SmartThings, you can use IFTTT to create a wide variety of recipes using a large catalog of interoperable devices and platforms for free. To do something similar, even with first-party Lowe's Iris accessories, you need to pay $10 a month. Here's the breakdown of what's free and what's not in the app on IrisbyLowes.com.
You can set an alarm to trigger when motion is detected.
That could all change in the coming months. Lowe's Iris will offer contract free monitoring as an optional add-on soon. At that point, a $20 monthly fee will include professional monitoring and the premium version of the app, plus cellular backup of the hub. That price feels much more worth it, given that monitoring alone costs $25 a month with SimpliSafe. AT&T's Digital Life charges as much as $65 a month for monitoring.
Plus, once monitoring becomes a reality for Lowe's, Koster assured me the company would start looking at the basic to premium breakdown, and moving some premium features to the other side of the paywall. But I can't give any credit now to a smart-home system based on how good it might be in a couple of months. As it stands, that $10 monthly fee is dumb.
You can customize the alarm on your Lowe's Iris system. When it sounds, you'll get an email, a call and a push notification.
Even the full version of the app -- which is what I used to test Iris by Lowe's -- isn't great. For one thing, multiple users can't access the same smart home system with their own log-ins. As you might expect, that upgrade is coming. Right now, the most you can do is assign PIN codes to a secondary user for locks and alarms, and allow that person to receive push notifications.
The dashboard for the primary user shows every category of device Lowe's Iris offers, whether you have something in that category or not. It even lists categories of devices that are still "coming soon." And there's no way to simplify or reorganize the main page of the app, so it feels more like a giant ad trying to get you to buy more Iris gear than a page designed to actually help you understand and control your home. You can change the picture at the top of the page, and a menu of buttons underneath that by selecting favorites, but that's it.
And you'll see the dashboard a lot, as navigating from one subsection to another requires you go back to the dashboard first. The dashboard itself has a menu button in the top left corner letting you jump to your devices, rules or scenes page. But for some reason, that button disappears once you select your submenu. None of those pages even have a button to immediately get back to the dashboard. You also can't add a new rule or device from their respective pages. Again, you have to go back to the dashboard, and click on the plus button in the upper right-hand corner.
The dashboard on the left has too much info you don't need, and I wish you could build a rule from scratch.
Fortunately, adding devices is easy and quick. The app walks you through the process each time and even includes a video tutorial you can click on during the setup if you need more help.
Adding rules isn't as intuitive. You can't just create one from scratch as you do with IFTTT. You need to find the category of the device you want the rule for, then select your rule from a list. Scrolling through prebaked rules for your devices is nice in that it could help you come up with ideas for what exactly to do with your smart home, but you'll also see a bunch of rules you can't activate yet until you buy more Lowe's Iris hardware.
How well does it work?
The smart button worked well... most of the time.
Once I figured out the app and had a few devices up and running, I had a mostly smooth time using Lowe's Iris. In addition to the Automation Pack, I synced the system to our Schlage Century deadbolt we previously had installed on SmartThings. Getting it to forget SmartThings and work with Lowe's was a pain, but I'm not sure that's something I can blame on Lowe's.
After the deadbolt connected to the hub, I had full functionality of it, and even an extra function I wasn't expecting -- using the Lowe's Iris app, I could buzz somebody in. So instead of just using the app to lock and unlock the door, if the door is locked, you can hit the "buzz in" button. The door will unlock then lock again a few moments later. I was pleased to see the Iris system not only working well with third-party devices, but being creative with the functionality.
I never noticed any lag over the couple of weeks I tested Iris, but several of the devices didn't stay consistently connected. For one thing, the smart button would only do what it was supposed to about 90 percent of the time. That seems like a lot, but if you use it as a panic button, you'd want to know for sure that the alarm would sound when you press it.
The contact sensor didn't stay connected.
Also, the contact sensor I placed on the closet door -- only a room away from the hub -- lost connection during the course of testing. The button did too once, but it came back online after I pressed it a few times. The contact sensor didn't come back until I took the battery out and put it back in.
For the most part, the Iris by Lowe's system performed adequately if you're using the devices for convenience, but not so reliably that I'd recommend using the devices for security.
The verdict
Professional monitoring, better multiuser integration and more free app functionality are all supposedly coming to the Iris by Lowe's Second Generation system in a matter of months. At that point, this could be a good smart-home system, but it isn't one right now. All of this potential, and all of these promises, along with the many angry commenters who felt spurned by the upgrade, make me think the second generation of the Lowe's Iris system hit retailers before it was done cooking.
To make this system worth it, you'd need to invest in devices, pay a monthly fee for the app, spend a lot of time setting up rules and schedules, and have the patience to resync devices whenever they lose their connection. You'd be doing all of that while gambling that Lowe's Iris gets the upgrades it needs without undoing any of your progress, and given how the last major upgrade went, that doesn't feel like a smart bet. If you like the potential of Lowe's Iris, I recommend leaving it on store shelves for now to make sure you don't get left behind when it does come to fruition. Otherwise, I recommend investing in a different smart-home system, such as Wink or SmartThings.