Smart lighting: the next generation
Things are getting better and cheaper – in fact, illuminating your home has never been so flexible
Smart light bulbs are, arguably, the cornerstone of the smart home. Switching lights on and off remotely is a gateway, it’s a primal thing that brings the whole process into focus for those who aren’t sure why they’d need to smarten up their home. There’s no great upheaval, no need to screw in anything new, no rewiring: you just install a bulb, hook it up to whatever system controls it, and your lights are smart.
‘Smart’ doesn’t just mean ‘remote’, either. Sure, the initial smart home, way back when, couldn’t manage much more than remote relays that lived outside the bulb, toggling the power to a lamp. But the move away from incandescent lighting, and away from CFLs, meant lights themselves became much smaller: the package which drives an LED bulb – the diode itself, along with the electronics and cooling required to drive it – makes up only a small part of the bulb itself. There is room to integrate network connectivity, so there’s often no need for any external hardware beyond that which you already own, and the small size and flexible nature of LEDs means they can do more than just light things up.
Smart bulbs make dimming a breeze, without the noisy dimmer switches of old. If they use the right LEDs you can change the temperature of your light, moving from a colder, more blueish tinge to a warmer, more orange light – the former great for concentrating on work, the latter perfect for relaxing later on. And many bulbs package together a full RGB LED system, giving you millions of potential colours to choose from; rarely useful, perhaps, but plenty of fun. The most versatile bulbs use both systems, which is important because an RGB-mixing bulb can’t quite get the same range of white light as one with dedicated white LEDs.
All about LEDs
You likely know most of this already. The rise of the LED in home lighting isn’t news – but the evolution of the LED possibly is. LEDs aren’t the self-contained units you might picture when you think ‘LED’. They’re not the miniature red light bulbs of yore: the plastic bulb part of these is a diffuser, used to spread the relatively direct light of an LED diode around. It’s a much smaller equivalent to the round or flat diffuser capping off many of today’s LED light bulbs. The LED itself, if it incorporates multiple diodes, can be any shape and any size, and indeed modern LEDs can get very large. Outdoor floodlights, for example, can blast out huge numbers of lumens with a large array of diodes.
The downside, if there is one, is cooling; if you have an LED bulb that’s been in service for a while, you’ll likely have noticed its stem, the part where the driving electronics are located, growing progressively more yellow or brown with the heat; there’s a lot less radiated from the front, as there was with old incandescent bulbs, but the bigger your LED array, the bigger the cooling required. Massive floodlights require large heatsinks to draw away heat – even then, over time, their diodes tend to fail one by one.
Not that that’s always the case; in many cases it’s a manufacturing issue, rather than an actual physical problem. In general, LED lasts a lot longer, with some bulbs claiming a lifespan of around 50,000 hours. We may never reach the
Many bulbs package together a full RGB LED system, giving you millions of potential colours to choose from
heady heights of the Livermore Centennial Light, which has burned since 1901, but LED bulbs outdo both incandescents and energy savers. They do, however, lose a little lustre over time, dropping in brightness with age.
Smart bulbs open us up to a whole new world of possibilities, and the industry seems to have dedicated itself to innovation. We’ve seen fancy wall installations from the likes of LIFX and Nanoleaf, light-up panels that provide a combination of mood lighting and wall-based flair. We’ve seen the smart bulb make its way outdoors, with products from the likes of Hue adding a touch of colour and cleverness to our gardens and front porches. But now we’re seeing a new wave of lighting – bulbs which are cheaper without losing compatibility with established ecosystems, and bulbs which take the LED to new places.
LIFX’s Plus series, for example, look just like normal LED smart bulbs (albeit with LIFX’s customary flair) and they behave like them too, with one exception: there’s a little hidden infrared light in there. Not something you’ll ever see with the naked eye, but if it’s shining on an area covered by a security camera you’ll get far greater night vision illumination than you would with only the weak LEDs attached to the camera. And that’s with the bulb (technically) turned off: as long as it’s turned on at the switch, the Plus bulb beams out infrared whether it’s lit up or not.
Going old school
Vintage-style bulbs are increasingly fashionable, and just about every major manufacturer has gotten on board or at least has vintage bulbs in the pipeline. These don’t reinvent the wheel – they use a series of LEDs arranged in a compact transparent strip which simulates the look of traditional carbon filament bulbs, otherwise known as Edison bulbs.
Then there are the new contenders, companies coming out of the woodwork with LED lighting solutions of their own. Some of these are hammering down the cost of smart lighting: notable names include The Netherlands-based Innr and China’s Xiaomi
made Yeelight, the latter of which is also marketed as Mi in some regions. Others are reputable names involving themselves in a new market; we look at a TP-Link RGB bulb in this issue, and the company also supplied us with the rather beautiful Kasa Filament K60 Edison-style bulb, which (once you’ve dialled it down enough to be able to look at it without burning your retinas) is a very atmospheric-looking bulb suitable for use without a shade.
Flip the switch
The smart bulb upgrades aren’t just in hardware. The apps behind them continue to evolve, with both Hue and LIFX releasing major upgrades and revisions, and third parties like TP-Link producing really very good apps of their own.
LIFX has radically refactored its layout, moving functions from one place to another, and now places far more prominence on room switches – very handy if you’re running a whole bunch of bulbs or feature lights in a single area. Hue’s controls are now much more easily accessible (and, again, room-focused) than in the previous version, and recolouring RGB lights is a breeze. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, but since you can’t control your LIFX lights with the Hue app, the point is moot.
One thing that does tie all lighting ecosystems together is a smart assistant. A room could be full of bulbs from a host of different manufacturers, but if they offer Alexa support (and most do) then setting up a routine to control them all with a single command is simplicity itself. Even if you’d rather stay quiet, or don’t have an actual Echo device, you can still hop on the Alexa app and connect your compatible kit together.