SMART LIGHTING
If there’s one upside to the cost of living crisis, it’s that dads worldwide have been vindicated in their mission to ensure nobody ever leaves the light on in an empty room. Lighting accounts for 11% of the UK’s average household electricity consumption (down from 18% a decade previously, before we started to move away from incandescent bulbs).
The most effective lighting change you can make is to replace halogen lights with LED ones, which typically use 75% less power. Today’s warm whites are much nicer than the headlight-blue bulbs that first hit the market, and smart bulbs give you lots of great colour options too. LED also expands your lighting options with products such as lightstrips and low energy decorative lighting.
Of course there’s a cost here, and in the case of some lighting systems such as older, pre-GU10 downlighters there may be compatibility issues too. But you’ll find LED lights and smart LED lights for all kinds of fittings now: not just bayonet and large screw bulbs but candle bulbs, spotlights, filamentstyle bulbs and more.
The king of smart lighting is Philips’ Hue, but Ikea’s Trådfri is impressive too, while Govee makes some great affordable options and lots of third party lights work happily with HomeKit, Alexa and Google Home. Be wary with LIFX, though: it went into receivership this year and while new owner Feit Electric promises to support existing devices and introduce new products in 2023, it might be prudent to choose a different platform unless you’re getting a really good deal.
With smart LED lights such as Hue, you can use multiple methods to reduce your energy usage: timers, of course, but also motion detectors to turn lights on and off, and geofencing that automatically turns everything off when you leave home. You can also create light ‘recipes’ or ‘scenes’ via the smart lighting app and apply them across multiple rooms, or create commands that turn everything off.
While the apps for different platforms differ – Hue’s app is by far the nicest, while Ikea’s is much simpler and Govee’s is rather brash –the key here is compatibility with your chosen smart home platform. That enables you to include your lights in the bigger smart home picture, so for example by enabling you to use Apple’s Home app to control Hue and Trådfri lights as well as other smart home kit.
Compatibility differs between platforms. Innr works with all the main platforms including Samsung SmartThings but not Apple’s HomeKit; Trådfri works with Alexa, HomeKit and Google Home; Govee works with Alexa and Google Home; and Hue works with everything.