You’ve heard of smartphones, smart watches and smart TVs, but what about smart lights? Smart home lighting can make life easier, save you money on energy bills and transform the ambience in your home. And turning a light on and off at the wall switch will become a thing of the past as we embrace this new technology: the global smart lighting market was valued at more than $16 billion and that’s projected to grow by more than 20 per cent by 2026.
What Are Smart Lights?
Smart lights are any lights that can be controlled through your wireless network. With this kind of connectivity and control, smart lighting offers a world of features and benefits, from changing the brightness and colours to scheduling lights to turn on or off. How awesome would it be to have your lights automatically turn on when you get home, and when you wake up, or turn off when you leave or go to bed?
Why Use Smart Lights?
More control means reduced energy bills, thanks to the ability to turn off groups of lights at the same time, or automatically when you’re not at home or in a room. Most smart lights also use LEDs, which use far less energy than regular bulbs, and they can also be dimmed to further reduce power usage.
You’ll also benefit from increased home security – program your smart lights to turn on and off at scheduled times when you’re away to make it look like you’re still at home. You can also set them up to act as a notification – imagine having a light change colour when someone rings your doorbell, or light up whenever you get an Instagram like.
Apart from the convenience and energy savings, one of the biggest benefits of smart lighting is the incredible ambience and mood that can be created in your home using colours and placements.
How to Get Started
Smart lights are designed to work with a companion app or are compatible with one or all of the smart assistants, such as Siri via Apple’s Home app, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant. It’s easy to get connected:
Step 1: Choose the spot where you’d like to place the smart light in your home.
Step 2: Connect the light to your WiFi network, either through the device’s app or by using your smart assistant, depending on the smart light’s compatibility.
Step 3: Give your smart light a name and location (such as Living Room LED strip, for example), as this will make it easier to nominate and control the lights and include them in a smart routine, so they can react when you come home or go to bed, or link them together as a group.
What to Try
If you’re trying smart lights for the first time, consider a starter kit:
- Philips Hue A60 B22 Starter Kit White Ambiance
- Philips Hue Outdoor Spot Smart Light Kit
- Nanoleaf Shapes Hexagon Starter Kit 9 Pack
SEE ALSO: Connect 101: How to Set up and Connect a Smart Home
Smart Lighting Accessories for Even Greater Control
A smart switch, like the Brilliant Lighting Smart Wi-Fi Plug with Energy Monitoring, allows you to use your smartphone to turn a light connected to the plug on and off, or schedule it to turn on for a selected time. And if you have a smart home hub, such as Amazon Echo, Google Nest Hub or Apple HomePod Mini, you can control the lights through voice commands, instructing them to turn on and off or to change colours and brightness at will. Voice control also works through your smartphone.
Have Fun With Shapes, Sizes and Colours
You’ll have plenty of options to create stunning lighting displays thanks to the many available smart lighting products in all shapes and sizes. Start with a single colour smart light bulb like the Philips Hue 10W Smart Bulb E27 Colour or the Brilliant Smart RGB and White Globe E27, which allows you to tune the globe to any of the 11 million colours in the RGB colour spectrum, offering a rainbow of colour options for your home. You can totally change a room with an LED light strip like the Lenovo Smart LED Light Strip 2M, while the Nanoleaf Hexagon Starter Kit 9 Pack makes it possible to arrange the light panels on your walls in various shapes and designs to create your own unique lighting masterpiece.
