Outdoor lighting options HUE LILY XL
$149.99, www2.meethue.com
IP65 rated, so it repels everything from dust to jetting water from a rogue sprinkler, the Lily XL is perfect for highlighting paths or bathing your lawn in a cone of glorious colored light. LIFX BR30 + $79.99, lifx.com As long as it’s under cover, LIFX’s wide–ended smart bulb is great for outdoors. The “+” means it outputs an infrared beam, giving night–vision cameras a significant visibility boost. Ring Spotlight Cam Battery $199, ring.com This may be more camera than spotlight, but there’s no doubt that it’s smart — and the fact that you don’t have to run any wires out to it makes installation an absolute breeze.
ALL ABOUT LEDS
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 think. 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. It’s a much smaller equivalent to the round or flat diffuser capping off many of today’s LED bulbs. The LED itself, if it incorporates multiple diodes, can be any shape and size, and 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.
But that’s not always the case: in many instances 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 about 50,000 hours. LED bulbs outdo incandescents and energy savers, but they do lose 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. We’ve seen the smart bulb make its way outdoors, with products from the likes of Hue adding a touch of color 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 and behave like them too, with one exception: there’s a little hidden infrared light in there. You won’t see it 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 Edison bulbs.
Then there are the new contenders with LED lighting solutions of their own, some of which are hammering down the cost of smart lighting. They 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 more familiar 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 beautiful, atmospheric Kasa Filament K60 Edison–style bulb.
FLIP THE SWITCH
The smart bulb upgrades aren’t just in hardware. The apps behind them continue to evolve, with Hue and LIFX releasing major upgrades and revisions, and third parties like TP– Link making their own great apps.
LIFX has radically refactored its layout, and now places far more prominence on room switches, handy if you’re running a bunch of bulbs or feature lights in one area. Hue’s controls are now much more easily accessible (and, again, room– focused) than in the previous version, and recoloring RGB lights is a breeze.
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 simple. 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.