Govee Uplighter Floor Lamp review: Paint your ceiling with shimmering light

Do-it-all smart home outfit Govee seemingly will not rest until every square inch of your home has light cast upon it. Its latest floor lamp/torchiere joins at least four previous freestanding lamp designs, along with two new floor lamps being launched alongside this one, the Uplighter.

The name tells the story in part: In addition to providing task-based downlight illumination, the Uplighter is particularly designed with upward-firing accent illumination in mind, along with a third, side-lighting mode. Featuring lights designed with “enhanced RGBWWIC” LEDs (the acronym indicates there are discrete elements for producing red, green, blue, white, and warm white light), which Govee says “seamlessly blends dynamic color effects with practical white lighting,” the three lighting zones work like this:

• Downlighting: 1,000 lumens from warm-white LEDs to provide tunable, white-light-only illumination for use as traditional, downward-firing task lighting.
• Uplighting: This is really the main event. About 300 lumens of RGBWW lights fire upwards, painting the ceiling with a ripple effect (which I’ll elaborate upon in a moment).
• Sidelighting: Finally, a ring of RGBIC LEDs add a purely decorative accent element that can be used to complement either the down- or uplighting feature. There’s no luminosity spec provided, but this section isn’t bright.

Christopher Null/Foundry

All of these lighting components are contained in a single head unit, which is attached to the top of a metal pole that’s a little more than five feet long. The pole comes pre-wired, in pieces which are simply screwed together, sans tools. With the base and head unit, the system comprises a total of six pieces that must be connected, not including the standard A/C adapter.

Note that the head of the lamp can be tilted up to 30 degrees in any direction, which is useful for directing task lighting or, perhaps, for aiming the uplighting element, if you have a sloped ceiling. (Note, however, that it is difficult to make sure the head unit is level, as the ball-and-socket joint has no system for determining when it’s level with the floor.)

Using the Govee Uplighter Floor Lamp

A pair of buttons on the uppermost segment of the pole can be used to manually power the lamp on and off and cycle through lighting modes on both the up- and downlighting sections. A long-press on the scene button also switches uplighting on and downlighting off, and vice versa on the following press. The various presets for the scene button can be customized by the user.

Christopher Null/Foundry

As with all things Govee, the lamp is designed to work with the Govee app and sets up over 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. The app auto-discovered the lamp once I powered it on, and a single press of a button on the hardware was all it took to complete the connection to my network.

As a task light, the lamp is solid, offering illumination that was more than bright enough for me to work under at full strength. (Even at about 20 percent brightness, I was still easily able to read by its light.) Color temperatures supported a range from 2700K to 6500K, providing more than enough variety for whatever mood you’re trying to set.

While the task lighting function is largely traditional, the upward-firing light is where things get wild. First, it’s important to note the upper light is exclusively designed to showcase a “ripple effect” that looks exactly how it sounds. Wavy bands of color shimmer and dance on the ceiling, waving back and forth either in monochrome or with multiple colors, keeping with one color scheme or cycling through multiples.

Christopher Null/Foundry

It’s a bit like the effect of a swimming pool reflecting onto the ceiling at night; but not quite, especially since the ripple effect eventually stops and reverses, which is a little jarring if you happen to catch it happening live. It turns out the effect is largely mechanical, and you can see the bulb under the rippled glass physically rotating if you watch closely. A music mode that changes the lighting in time with ambient sound is also included and can use either the lamp’s microphone or your phone’s for its source, but the ripple effect remains.

Lighting effects

As is always the case with Govee, the user is given a seemingly infinite number of preloaded scenes to play with, whether you want your ceiling to look like it’s bathed in white moonlight, red flames, or chaotic graffiti (found under the “Funny” scene selections). Everything is displayed with that shimmering ripple effect. Of course, you can always DIY a scene of your own if nothing on the menu works for you, use Govee’s AI mode to ask for a bespoke scene, or check out the “Share Space” feature, where other Govee users can upload their own illuminated art.

The sidelighting system includes another 8 segments of LEDs that you can play with to complement either the uplighting or downlighting modes—either as accent or contrast—and many of the built-in modes have preloaded settings to control the sidelighting as well. You can also control this lighting directly, even going to far as to address each of the 8 LED segments individually with their own color.

Christopher Null/Foundry

What can’t you do with the Uplighter? The big limitation is that you can’t run both uplighting and downlighting simultaneously. While the sidelighting system can operate with either, Govee’s position is that task lighting and mood lighting are mutually exclusive. And to reiterate, there’s no color downlighting on the device, because Govee also seems to say that when you’re supposed to be working, you can’t be having fun.

The height of your ceiling matters when it comes to the ripple effect. Beneath a low, 7-foot ceiling, the ripple is bright, commanding a tight area about 4 feet across. But cast on a 12-foot ceiling, the ripple spreads across about 12 feet of space, with its brightness significantly diminished. You won’t readily be able to alter this, of course, beyond adjusting the placement and brightness of the lamp.

Power consumption

Christopher Null/Foundry

Govee breaks down the power draw of the lamp by section: The downlight draws up to 9 watts, the sidelight 3.8 watts, and the uplight 17.8 watts, all of which seem reasonable. Support for Matter, Alexa, and Google Assistant are all also included – though as is common with complex lighting products like this, third-party ecosystems will greatly limit how much you can do with the device. That said, I had no trouble getting the Uplighter set up in each of them.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart lighting.

Should you buy the Govee Uplighter Floor Lamp?

For $180, the Govee Uplighter might well be the most expensive torchiere in your home; it will likely also be your biggest conversation piece. The purchase decision, however, will almost exclusively come down to your thoughts about the ripple effect on your ceiling.

I think it’s kind of cool, but my wife took one look at it and made a face. You know the one.