SwitchBot Smart Candle Warmer Lamp review

SwitchBot Smart Candle Warmer Lamp: Introduction

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

Instead of burning a candle with an open flame, it gently heats the wax from above, through a halogen lightbulb, releasing fragrance without smoke, soot, or a fire risk.

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

What that means is that it can slot straight into just about any smart home platform without needing a dedicated hub.

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

Read on for my full SwitchBot Candle Warmer Lamp review.

Design and setup

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

The lamp has a clean, modern look with a tube-style base and arm, topped with a hood that hangs down over the candle. It stands around 30cm tall, with the bulb sitting roughly 20cm above where your candle goes.

There’s enough clearance for most standard jar candles without feeling oversized.

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

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

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

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

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

The 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 a SwitchBot Hub for cross-platform support.

You can pair it directly to any Matter controller you already have, which is excellent news if you’re not deep into the SwitchBot ecosystem.

Normally, I’d still recommend adding a device to the manufacturer’s app first to unlock extra features. Here, it barely matters.

The SwitchBot app gives you 1–100% dimming, timers up to 23 hours 50 minutes (in 10-minute increments), fade-in and fade-out times from 5 seconds to 60 minutes, and one-off or repeating schedules.

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

In use and energy use

Functionally, it’s a 50W halogen bulb inside a carefully shaped hood that directs heat straight down onto the candle.

That’s it… But it works.

With the brightness cranked to 100%, my candle started melting within about five minutes.

Once the wax was properly melted, I could drop the brightness to around 60% and keep it there, maintaining a steady pool of melted wax and a consistent fragrance throw.

Because brightness directly controls heat output, you’re effectively adjusting scent intensity using a dimmer slider, which is oddly satisfying.

It supports candles up to 9.5cm in diameter and 14cm in height, which covers most standard jar candles.

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

It does get hot, though. There’s 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 like candles, want fragrance without flames and enjoy slightly ridiculous smart home gadgets then it makes a weird amount of sense.

Energy consumption

Running this halogen bulb isn’t really expensive, even for an extended period. For every hour the bulb was on 100%, it consumed an average of 0.052kWh of electricity.

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

If you run the bulb for an extended period in the evening, say a 5-hour session, your total energy consumption would be 0.26kWh, bringing the total cost to only about 6.9p in the UK or about 4.7 cents in the US.

That’s still 10 times the price that an LED GU10 would use, but an LED GU10 wouldn’t emit enough heat to melt the candle wax.

I know what you’re thinking… in both the UK and the US, the sale of most inefficient lighting, including halogen bulbs, has been pretty-much banned as part of major national efforts to improve energy efficiency.

However, those bans are primarily focused on bulbs used for general illumination, and there are exemptions for specialist applications where heat is the function. So the ban is for halogen lighting not halogen heating.

I did try and chuck an LED GU10 in there to see if it could be used as a smart lamp without the warming effect and no dice, it flickered like mad.

SwitchBot does state you can “purchase a halogen bulb with the specification GU10 50W for the Candle Warmer Lamp” so don’t worry if the two you get in the box stop working.

Final thoughts

Really… it’s just a cheap smart light. But it’s also pretty dumb, as it doesn’t do much.

But candle warmers are indeed a thing, so why not? Especially if you are already using SwitchBot or any of the other ecosystems that work with Matter (i.e. all of them) have a smart one?

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

It’s actually very effective to give you that flameless, smokeless aroma and fragrances with all the usual smart home control methods thrown in.

How we test

When we publish our reviews, you can rest assured that they are the result of “living with” long term tests.

Smart lights usually live within an ecosystem, or a range of products that – supposedly – all work in harmony. Therefore, it’s impossible to use a connected light for a week and deliver a verdict.

Because we’re testing smart home kit all day, everyday, we know what matters and how a particular light compares to alternatives that you might also be considering.

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

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