LIGHTING, BLINDS & CURTAINS
Manual control? Pah! It’s time to get smart…
One of the first modern smart home tech products available was Philips Hue smart lighting. And the company’s been adding to its collection of smart lights ever since with a range that includes outdoor lighting, batterypowered lamps, TV light strips and bulbs of every kind. And there are interesting smart lights from Eve and from Nanoleaf, whose normal bulbs are supplemented by really fun shaped lights that can produce dynamic decorative illumination.
What’s great about smart lights, bulbs and associated devices – such as smart plugs, remote dimmers, switches and increasingly, smart blinds and curtain openers and closers – isn’t just that you can control them remotely, via Siri or even by geolocation so they activate when you come home. It’s that you can combine them into scenes.
For example, you can have a scene that makes different lights different colours or that uses adaptive lighting to match the colours of daylight as the sunlight moves from cool to warm. And you can even include lighting in your home entertainment; many smart lights can sync with your music, movies or video games (albeit often expensively – a Hue Play HDMI Sync Box and TV lightstrip will cost nearly £400). You can even use smart lights on your Christmas tree.