Switch Bot Smart Candle Warmer lamp review – Ambient

SwitchBot Smart Candle Warmer Lamp: An Introduction

It’s a touch gimmicky indeed, but SwitchBot’s Candle Warmer Lamp takes a familiar, old-school idea and pulls it firmly into the smart home era.

Instead of lighting a candle with an open flame, it slowly heats the wax from the top, with a halogen lamp, releasing the fragrance without the smoke, soot, or fire hazard.

We’re told it’s the first candle warmer in the world to support Matter-over-Wi-Fi, and that’s not something we need to double-check.

That means it can plug straight into almost any smart home platform without needing a dedicated hub.

At under $40, it’s clearly positioned as a fun, affordable home accessory but, spend some time with it, and it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t just novelty for novelty’s sake.

Read on for my full review of the SwitchBot Candle Warmer Lamp.

Design and set up

For something in this niche, SwitchBot has done a surprisingly solid job in design.

The lamp has a clean, modern look with a tube style base and arm, fitted with a hood that hangs over the candle. It stands about 30cm tall, and the lamp sits about 20cm above where your candle goes.

There is enough clearance for most standard jar candles without feeling bulky.

It’s available in black or white, and will blend in easily on a side table or shelf.

In the box, you get the candle warmer itself, a smart wired controller built into the cable, and GU10 50W halogen lamps.

That controller is a small, pebble-shaped plastic unit that sits about 20cm down the cable from the lamp.

It has three chunky buttons: power, brightness, and a timer button that cycles through preset options. From there, you get another 1.5m cable to the wall plug.

Setup with the SwitchBot app takes you down through the SwitchBot’s standard Bluetooth pairing mode before you name it, assign it a room, and connect it to your home Wi-Fi (2.4GHz) network only.

A Matter QR code is printed on the back of the controller…

Smart home compatibility

Because it’s Matter-over-Wi-Fi, you don’t need the SwitchBot Hub for field support.

You can pair it directly with any Matter controller you already own, which is great news if you’re new to the SwitchBot ecosystem.

In general, I still recommend adding the device to the manufacturer’s app first to unlock more features. Here, it doesn’t matter.

The SwitchchBot app gives you 1–100% dimming, timers up to 23 hours and 50 minutes (in 10-minute increments), fade-in and fade-out times from 5 seconds to 60 minutes, and a one-time or recurring shutdown schedule.

But you can replicate almost all of that within your smart home platform of choice anyway.

In the use and application of energy

In operation, a 50W halogen bulb inside a well-shaped hood directs heat directly down the candle.

That’s it… But it works.

As the light dimmed to 100%, my candle began to melt within five minutes.

Once the wax was well melted, I could turn the light down to about 60% and keep it there, maintaining a steady pool of melted wax and a consistent scent cast.

Because the light directly controls the heat output, you effectively adjust the intensity of the scent using a dimming slider, which is oddly satisfying.

Supports candles up to 9.5cm in diameter and 14cm in height, including most standard jar candles.

I tested both soy-based essential oil candles and traditional beeswax, and both worked as expected.

It’s hot, though. There is a warning sticker on the hood for a reason. You wouldn’t want to leave your hand under it for more than a second or two.

If you love candles, want a nice scent without the flames and enjoy smart home gadgets that don’t make any sense then it makes a strange sense of logic.

Energy consumption

Using this halogen lamp is not really expensive, even for a long time. Hour by hour the bulb was at 100%, consuming an average of 0.052kWh of electricity.

Based on the latest average energy prices, leaving a light bulb on for a full hour would only cost about 1.4 pence in the UK or less than 1 cent in the US.

If you use the lamp for an extended period of time in the evening, say a 5-hour session, your total energy consumption will be 0.26kWh, bringing the total cost to just around 6.9p in the UK or around 4.7 cents in the US.

That’s still 10 times the price an LED GU10 would use, but an LED GU10 won’t put out enough heat to melt candle wax.

I know what you’re thinking… in the UK and US, the sale of inefficient light bulbs, including halogen bulbs, is heavily restricted as part of a major national effort to improve energy efficiency.

However, that restriction is mainly focused on bulbs used for general lighting, and there are exemptions for special applications where heat is a function. So the ban is on halogen lighting and not halogen heat.

I tried putting an LED GU10 in there to see if it could be used as a smart light without the warming effect and without the dice, it flickered like crazy.

SwitchchBot says you can “buy a halogen lamp with a GU10 50W Candle Warming Lamp specification” so don’t worry if the two you get in the box stop working.

Final thoughts

Really… cheap smart lighting. But it’s also dumb, as it doesn’t do much.

But warm candles are really a thing, so why not? Especially if you’re already using SwitchBot or one of the creatures that work with Matter (which is all of them) have smarts?

Sure, you can attach a smart plug to a non-smart candle warmer, but where’s the fun in that? And you wouldn’t get granular control over the heat.

It actually works very well to give you that flameless, smokeless smell with all the usual home control methods thrown in.

How do we test

When we publish our reviews, you can be sure that they are the result of “life” and long-term testing.

Smart lights usually live within an ecosystem, or a range of products – so-called – that all work in harmony. Therefore, it is impossible to use the connected light for a week and bring a decision.

Because we test smart home kit all day, every day, we know what’s important and how certain lights compare to others you might consider.

Our reviews are comprehensive, objective and fair and, of course, we are never directly paid to review a device.

Read our guide on how to test smart lights to learn more.