Make your life easier by installing lights that automatically turn on when you walk into the room.
Smart lighting can provide a large range of benefits, from simple conveniences to more direct safety and security. While the benefits range in terms of impact to your home life, we’re sure you’ll find a few reasons to include smart lights into your home.
So, let’s take a look at the 4 main benefits that you actually care about, so you can decide if smart lighting is right for you.
You might already know what smart lighting is, but just in case you don’t. When we talk about smart lighting, we’re including everything from smart light bulbs, lamps, light strips to smart light switches. All these devices connect wirelessly, allow you to control them via an app on your phone, wireless remote accessories, voice commands and even through automations.
If you want to read more about what smart lighting is, we’ve created two in-depth guides on What are Smart Lights and What are Smart Lights Switches.
Or if you’d like to learn even more including recommendations we’ve created our ultimate guide to smart lighting.
Offering plenty of benefits, smart lighting is a great addition to a lot of homes. While some may argue they only provide added conveniences, we wanted to highlight their main benefits so you can make up your own mind.
Benefits are quite subjective and depending on your situation, certain benefits will appeal more to you than others. We’ve done our best to be as neutral as possible and ordered our list of benefits from most to least impactful.
Here are our top reasons you should look at installing smart lighting into your home.
Arguably the most important benefit is the extra control smart lighting bring to your home. Let’s have a look at the different ways they can be controlled.
These new ways of control your lights really blend into your typical day-to-day life, with the right automation flicking a switch might become a rare occurrence.
This control also extends beyond just having them turn on and off, given the right bulbs or switches, you can dim and change the colour of your lights. Something that’s hard, expensive if not impossible to do with traditional lights.
Smart lights are by no means a full-proof way to stop someone breaking in – but through automating your lights, you can make it appear like someone is home even when you’re away. Setup timers for when your lights turn on and off each night, for that “at home” look and feel.
As for safety, motion sensing outdoor lights are great when you arrive home late, or you want to see who’s out front. Lights are only part of a security system, which could include motion sensors and cameras which help deter intruders, some insurance providers may also reduce your yearly cost if you install them.
Lights can also be programmed in a way to flash when the smoke or fire alarm goes off. Great for anyone that might be deaf or hard of hearing.
Through adjusting the brightness and colour of the lights, you can setup some elaborate scenes. Great for date or movie nights, even sync them to your TV for added immersion while watching a film or gaming.
Colour really can make a world of difference in a room, but even just being able to dim your lights (which smart lights and smart switches can both do) is a real useful feature.
Not a well-known fact, but for a better nights sleep you should be using a warmer (orange) light before bed – as a cooler (bluer) light can make it harder to fall asleep. Smart bulbs can be setup to automatically change the colour tone to a warmer light every night, and a cooler light in the morning to help you wake up.
Bright and colourful lights has also been known to improve people’s moods, but the science is still a bit up in the air on this.
This one can be true, however if you’re already running LED bulbs chances are smart lights won’t save you much more energy. Many websites compare how energy efficient smart lights are, but they assume you’re replacing older incandescent bulbs in your home.
In which case smart lights or in fact any LED light will of course save you money, as LED bulbs consume much less power at comparable brightness levels.
For comparison, an average LED bulb will consume only 10W of power, while outputting as much light as a traditional 60W incandescent bulb. Making LED 6 times more power efficient in this case.
They can also last for around 25,000 hours – which should get you through a good 10 to 20 years of continued usage.
There are other ways smart lights can save you money, like setting schedules so you never leave a light on accidently. Or have all your lights turn off with a single voice command or push of a button.
We have to admit, smart lights aren’t essential by any means.
That said they do have a lot to offer and we’re sure you’ll find a few uses for them, apart from the added conveniences they offer, which shouldn’t be overlooked.
Looking into them more, the extra features they enable such as being able to automate your lights, with timers and sensors, and changing the colour of the lights aren’t usually possible with traditional lights.
Like most smart home products, they don’t tend to come cheap. Though they are coming down in price as more companies enter the market, such as Ikea, who offer entry level smart lights.
