Smart Lighting

Smart Lights are LED Light Bulbs, Strips, Tiles and other light-emitting fixtures that can connect to Smart Home devices via a Wi-Fi network. Smart Bulbs are easily installed inside pre-existing light fixtures, whereas Smart Light Strips and Tiles can be stuck to walls and surfaces and are powered by USB cables. For many people Smart Lighting is a simple and low cost first step for testing out whether a smart home setup works for them.

With a Wi-Fi connection Smart Lights can be synced with each other and paired with other devices at home, allowing turning lights on and off and controlling via an app on a Smart Phone or voice via a Smart Speaker or other digital assistant enabled device. Many Smart Lights can change hue and colour as well as be dimmed and brightened, and can be controlled anywhere you have internet access. Smart Lights can be programmed to switch on/off at certain times or under certain conditions such as detecting someone's presence in the room or movement towards the room.

Smart Lights come in a variety of shapes and sizes, like bulbs that are installed inside screw and bayonet light fixtures standard in homes or smart light strips, tiles and panels that can be stuck to surfaces and powered via USB.

Once placed the Smart Lights at home can be setup and controlled via the brand's or potentially Google Home app. Most Smart Lights from Nanoleaf, TP-LINK and Connect SmartHome can also be voice controlled using an assistant like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. When first installing a Smart Light and its respective app the app will walk through the process of connecting the lighting to a wireless network. Once the connection is established Smart Lights should be recognized by other smart devices on the network, be able to communicated with and controlled.

Lights can be controlled and programmed from anywhere in the world with login details and internet access.

Most Smart bulbs use LED (Light Emitting Diode) technology as a source of light. Traditionally home lights are either incandescent including filaments or fluorescent with tubes or bulb-shaped spirals.

In terms of pure energy efficiency LED lights outperform both incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. For comparison, to achieve the same performance as a 60W incandescent bulb, a fluorescent bulb will use 14W and an LED uses only 7W. LED bulbs also last longer overall with an average lifespan of roughly 25000 hours versus 8000 and 1200 hour lifespans of fluorescent and incandescent bulbs respectively.

When comparing Smart Lights to normal LED lights a Smart Lighting setup has some potential additional advantages. Smart Light Bulbs may be a little more expensive up front but they tend to be more energy efficient overall, as they can be controlled remotely such as switching all lights off when no-one is home.

Like most Smart Home tech, you get out what you put into Smart Lighting. They're re a great, energy efficient lighting option lasting for around 25 thousand hours or 5 hours a day for 13 years, and a simple low cost entry point into Smart Tech. For people with a disability or limited mobility, lighting controlled using voice or an app can be immensely useful.

Because many Smart Lights can have their colour and hue adjusted it's easy to ensure all lighting at home is uniform. They can also be adjusted throughout the day to ensure perfect lighting at all hours at home. Program the lights to come on at full brightness in the morning for a noiseless alarm, or dim the lights and adjusting the colours for a great way to create ambience or low lighting to get up in the middle of the night.