Smart lighting

It’s time to illuminate your home in a new way — and get the best from your bulbs

There’s a lot more to smart bulbs than just some fancy colors — they have the power to transform the way that you illuminate your home.

Smart lighting, we have to admit, looks on the outside like little more than a gimmick. Even now it’s had a few years to mature, the marketing surrounding the process of making your home lighting smart revolves around the pretty RGB colors, and almost entirely sidesteps the more subtle and useful features of clever bulbs.

But it shouldn’t: used properly — and for the right reasons — smart lighting can completely transform your home.

First and foremost, let’s dispel any kind of intimidation: smart lighting is easy to get on board with. There’s no need to throw out all of your existing light bulbs and start again; you can add smart bulbs to your current lighting setup piecemeal, and they’ll work alongside dumb bulbs just fine. Smart bulbs aren’t listening to you, or indeed doing anything more sinister than illuminating your home.

You won’t need to rewire anything; smart bulbs take the same power source as the regular kind, and are generally available in varieties that match common light fittings. If your chosen bulb doesn’t match up — if you need to convert an E26 bulb to an E12 bulb, for example — there are cheap screw-in adapters available that will do the trick. One caveat is that they often don’t play nicely with old-fashioned dimmer switches, but they have this in common with most standard LED bulbs, and we’ve never seen a smart bulb without its own dimming functionality built in.

Finally, having smart bulbs doesn’t render your current light switches irrelevant. Yes, you’ll be able to turn your lights on and off from within an app, but any smart light worth its salt will remember its last setting when you cut the power and return to it when you restore it, so you don’t always have to open up your phone to toggle the photons.

In fact, if you link up your lights with Apple’s HomeKit, you can do it all with your voice and a little help from Siri. The catch There has to be a catch, right? Setting up smart lighting in the first place can be difficult, especially if the system you are using requires its own smart hub. Philips’ Hue is probably the biggest name on the market right now, and relies on a hub (which it calls a bridge) — a device wired up to your router — to ensure reliable wireless connectivity of its bulbs; without that item, and the additional expense it demands, the bulbs’ smart features won’t work. Others, like LIFX, sacrifice that

Adding extras to your smart lighting system can help it work even more efficiently

reliability for a simpler hub-less system, communicating through your home’s Wi-Fi connection. Individual bulbs tend to cost a little more, and you’re going to need a wireless router that’s comfortable with a whole lot of simultaneous connections if you don’t want your lights to affect your overall network speed.

The other big problem, currently, is that smart lights from different manufacturers don’t necessarily play nice with each other. Grab a bunch of Hue lights, for example, and you won’t easily be able to then expand your smart lighting network with LIFX bulbs — they require different apps and different protocols.

You can use many kinds in tandem without any trouble, but automating them together — sharing colors, for example, or grouping them — isn’t possible without a lot of hard work. This might all change in time, with protocols such as Zigbee helping to unify different platforms with a common underlying interface, but since it’s not really a profitable endeavour for bulb manufacturers to help their competitors, you shouldn’t hold your breath. Actually, let’s wind back a little: with HomeKit (and ideally with an iPad or Apple TV acting as a home hub), you can operate and automate lights from a number of different manufacturers from one place. Doing more Once you’ve installed smart lights, there are so many things you can do with them. True, you can’t sidestep the RGB aspect, common on most pricier bulbs. Think more laterally, though; you could trigger a specific color on a lamp to act as a notification, add atmosphere to your family room on film night with a dim red bulb or, if you’re opting for Hue bulbs, even tie the color and lighting of your bulbs to your consoles or movies using their Entertainment mode.

Even non-RGB bulbs have a very practical purpose: switching lighting temperature to suit your activities is a great way to maximize their value. A cool, blue-hued light encourages focus, perfect for working, while you can trend towards the warmer, more orange end of the spectrum when you’re eating or relaxing.

Adding extras to your smart lighting system can help it work even more efficiently. We’re fond of motion sensors, for example, both to trigger porch lights and for the less occasional benefit of dimly lighting a hallway at night, preventing stubbed toes on the way to the bathroom.