Can I automate my lights?

stuart brailsford, whit ley bay

AUm, yes? Basic automation of lights is a thing, as Guru has been attempting to explain to the terrified members of his village council for some years. Motion sensors on outdoor security lights, clicky plug-in lamp timers so that GaGu Senior can pretend to watching burglars that he’s not on his seventh holiday this year, ambient light sensing that switches on outdoor lights at entirely the wrong time of day, that sort of thing. Getting hold of basic automated lighting is easy, and it’s rarely difficult to set up.

But the modern technologist prefers to do things in a slightly cooler way. Take, for instance, Guru’s moderately-creepy Philips Hue-infused hallways, which gently spin up a nice ambient light as you walk through them, as if a luminous spectre is following you to the loo. He merely installed a few Hue bulbs (a two-bulb starter set with the controller should set you back about £60), a couple of Hue Motion Sensors (£35 each) and did a bit of software fiddling with Philips’ excellent app.

Take things one step further, why don’t you: integrate a lighting system like Hue or Belkin’s WeMo (£25 per bulb) with If This Then That (ifttt.com) and you can pull off stacks of statebased actions. Why not trigger your lights the instant your phone hits Wi-Fi range of your house, or switch them all off when you leave home? How about performing complex poltergeisty lamp flickers to spook house guests at the push of a button even if you’re hundreds of miles away? Heck, why not have a coloured bulb (the Hue Bloom mood light is around £50) change to a deep red when you have unread messages? Even if you don’t fancy getting special lights – Guru won’t tell the authorities if you’re clinging on to an ageing incandescent bulb – you can pull off the trick on any old lamp by employing a WeMo Switch (£40) or similar.