Quadruple power supply for Play Lightbar, Iris, Bloom & Co.

Actually, Philips Hue had a great idea with the launch of the Play Lightbar several years ago: The power supply is equipped with three slots to be able to operate several Lightbars at one socket. The Hue Sync Box, the Lightstrip Plus, the Gradient Lightstip and the Signe table lamp as well as the Hue Iris and Hue Bloom also use the same connection. Apart from the Sync Box, however, all of these Hue products only come with a simple power supply with a slot.

And that is a problem, because in power strips this XXL power supply is anything but practical and often blocks the adjacent connections. It is incomprehensible why Philips Hue does not yet offer a powerful power supply as a separate accessory here – I could imagine that this would be very interesting for many users.

On Amazon, I have now come across a third-party product that aims to fill exactly this gap. The “KFD Charger 24V” offers four connections, which I have successfully tried out with Hue products such as the Hue Iris, Hue Play Lightbar and the Hue Gradient Signe. With a price of around 28 euros (Amazon Germany), it's not exactly cheap, but currently also unrivalled.

However, there is a small restriction: While the Hue power supply delivers a maximum of 21 watts for three connections, the KFD power supply “only” delivers 24 watts for connections. Here you should be careful not to exceed the maximum power. A Play Lightbar consumes up to 6.7 watts, the Iris 8.1 watts and the Gradient Signe up to 11.8 watts. Although these figures are only reached in extremely bright and cool white scenes, you should still keep this in mind.

Of course, it would be even nicer if Philips Hue would provide a power supply with four or five connections and a power of 40 or 50 watts. In my opinion, this is long overdue and would certainly have a positive influence on one or two purchase decisions.