Home automation technology has moved on leaps and bounds in recent years. In the 1990s, you had to be a billionaire at the head of a major tech company to get a computer controlling your house. The technology was bespoke and fitted on a client-by-client basis.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and things are very different. Home automation technology is about a thousand times cheaper, but it’s orders of magnitude better too. You tell your digital assistant what you want, and it’ll get on with it in the background – no questions asked.
Smart lighting is one of the most accessible forms of home automation, but also tragically underutilized. I’m quick to use tech when it makes sense, but also don’t want to leave my home exposed to possible hacking. Let’s take a look at how smart lighting can help make your home a pleasant place to live, and some of the benefits that it brings.
What Is Smart Lighting?
Smart lighting is any programmable tool you use to illuminate areas of your home. Most smart lights are for your interiors, but you can get varieties outside of your home.
When people talk about “smart” lighting today, they’re referring primarily to devices you control with a smartphone. Therefore, these lights have WiFi or Bluetooth receivers on them, allowing you to send instructions from your phone to your lighting, instructing in on what to do next. The units contain a small processor and memory bank, allowing you to program basic settings remotely.
Companies that supply smart lighting usually provide a downloadable companion app. All you do is fire this up and start fiddling around with the settings, effectively controlling every aspect of your lights.
Smart lighting is not synonymous with LEDs. LED just refers to the technology that produces the light (as opposed to traditional incandescent), instead of the underlying connectivity that makes it smart.
Should You Get Smart Lighting?
Smart lighting isn’t just a wacky new technology, though. It also offers a bunch of benefits that make it ideal for anyone who wants to create the perfect home. Here are some of the benefits you can expect.
Reduce Your Energy Consumption
Many people are keen to reduce their energy consumption and cut their carbon footprint. Doing that with traditional lighting solutions, however, is challenging.
Smart lighting gets around the majority of these problems, though. For starters, practically all smart lights on the market today use LED technology, automatically cutting energy consumption 80 percent.
The fact that you can control them remotely also makes a big difference. If you’ve forgotten to turn off your porch light after you get into bed, you don’t have to go traipsing downstairs to turn it off. You just control it from your phone. Thus, you’re not tempted to leave it on all night.
It’s a similar story when you rush out of the house in the morning and don’t check whether you’ve turned everything off. You just hop on the companion app, switch off any lights you might have left on while you were in a hurry – and that’s it.
Don’t try to install smart lights yourself. Like any other electrical equipment in your home, you need professionals. Call your local electricians. They can hook them up to the mains safely, according to your needs.
Improve Security
Burglars know that homes without any lights on are the easiest target. Thus, here too, smart lights can help.
The idea is pretty simple. When you’re away from home, you can program lights to turn on in the evening and remain illuminated during the night, before switching off in the morning, according to a timer. You can also program lights to turn on automatically if anyone approaches your front door or sniffs around the back of your house, provided you have sensors installed. Or you can switch lights on remotely, randomly, or using a visual feed to your telephone.
You can also create so-called “room routines.” The idea here is to switch on lighting in sequence to mimic how a person occupying a home might. So, you could program it first to turn on lights in the living room, then the bathroom, then the bedroom and so on. Street burglars would conclude that somebody was home and, hopefully, move onto another target.
Improve Your Mood
Smart lights mostly emit white light – the most practical. But LED technology means that they can issue a host of colors from right across the RGB space. You could, for instance, choose orange light for your living room, blue for the bathroom and yellow for the kitchen – it all depends on your preferences.
Some smart light vendors offer apps that let you calibrate the precise colors in your rooms. You literally choose from an RGB palette, how you might on a photo editing tool. The light will then adjust to produce that precise color.
Being able to choose colors can make a big difference in how you feel – more than you’d think. We spend our lives living in brightly-lit white-light spaces, but there’s evidence that we shouldn’t, especially in the evenings. Therefore, you can program your lights to emit the type of light most conducive to keeping your body clock in check. LEDs cycle through bright white in the morning to mimic sunrise, warm orange, and yellow in the evening for sunset.
Control Lights Remotely
Perhaps the most significant benefit of smart lighting is that you can control it remotely, and we’re not just talking about via your phone. Most home assistants now allow you to simply issue commands to your lights using your voice, turning your living room into the bridge of the starship Enterprise.
Smart lights are clearly the future of lighting – it’s just a case of convincing people that they’re worth the investment. Whether you should invest in it depends on your situation. But as you can see, it’s not just a gimmick. There are real benefits to installing one of these systems in your home. It’s a great way to protect your property, cut bills, and improve your overall quality of life.