THE LIGHT CHOICE
Still working with boring old bulbs? Lighting has changed, and it’s time you see the difference
Going for something less flashy and more refined… Or full-on party-style illumination?
Nothing makes a home feel smart like lighting. Automated and customisable illumination makes a massive difference to the comfort of your entire living space and can, to coin a TV cliche, really bring a room together. Lest you think this is just idle bluster to begin an article about smart lighting… Well… No, hang on, there’s actual science involved; a 2014 article published in the Journal of Building Engineering suggests that automating lighting – and specifically tying lighting, shade, and air conditioning systems together with shared data – “outperforms all other strategies in energy and visual comfort performance”. If you can do it, you should.
Looking up is an obvious first step. There are smart options available for all kinds of ceiling fixtures – whether you’re running a bayonet fitting, a screw fitting, or the GU10 configuration more common in flush-fit settings. Some of these are tremendously cheap, though don’t let that be the metric by which you select a bulb.
Cheaper usually means dimmer and dumber. The no-name RGB lighting you’ll pick up at a supermarket is, at least in general, far from smart, toting a basic remote control and throwing out so few lumens that you’ll be lucky if you can see a thing at night. Beware purchases on some inexpensive online retail sites, too: there’s no guarantee of proper testing or of quality, and while lower-end LED arrays may burn bright, they often don’t burn for long.
Cheap choices
Some manufacturers are driving the price down with what seem to be quality products. Chinese powerhouse Xiaomi has begun bringing its Yeelight brand towards our Western shores, and reports suggest they’re both bright and quick to act, putting the company almost on an even footing with the likes of LIFX and Philips Hue in terms of performance.
Crucially, though, Yeelight bulbs come in at around a third of the average price of their competitors, at least in terms
of RGB bulbs. Interestingly, Donovan Sung, director of product management for Xiaomi, announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress that the company was also working on a budget-priced plain white Wi-Fi bulb in conjunction with Philips, suggesting prices could drop across the board in the future.
That raises an interesting point about ceiling lighting, and it’s one we’ve mulled over before. How often, realistically, will you use the RGB functions of a bulb? If the answer is ‘rarely’, and it likely is, the extra expense of a rainbowcoloured ceiling light probably isn’t worth it. Kitting out your whole home with interactive bulbs is an expensive enough proposition as it is – throwing extra money at something that’s only ever going to be used when you trigger your custommade ‘red alert’ automation is frivolous at best. Opt for RGB if you can afford it, particularly if you want to move beyond warm white lighting to a relaxing orange glow, but it’s by no means essential.
Add some colour
Where RGB really shines is in atmospheric lighting. A hidden LED strip in the kitchen, adding atmospheric uplighting; a corner lamp in the living room, or one on the wall for effect; coolcoloured lights in your garden, showing the neighbours how it’s done; even an intelligent set of RGB emitters next to the TV like Philips’ cool Hue Play which tie into your media consumption and compliment what’s on your TV. They’re all remarkably effective at making your home feel different.
That’s a solid-use case, but even then there are things to watch out for. We’ve tested, in the past, some rather iffy light strips made smart only through the use of some pretty half-baked hardware. One strip in particular (mentioning no names, here) took a cheap string of LEDs and a Bluetooth controller, wired the two together and called it done: if you were out of Bluetooth range you couldn’t do a thing with it, it constantly forgot what you’d asked it to do, and it defaulted to the most cold, eye-piercing blue-white light imaginable. Not a pleasing experience, and not a product that inspired any trust.
The point here, really, is that however expensive smart lighting may be, it’s important to make the right choice and to invest in the right product. Big-name brands charge more but offer a much better experience, longer lasting products, and many more automation options than their small-time cousins. There are some very promising upstarts coming out of the woodwork, but if you’re going to want to integrate motion sensors for ambient night lighting, if you’re looking to make your lights warmer as the evening draws in, if you’re looking for a light that does exactly what you want and plays nice with Apple’s Home app, you’re going to have to do your homework.