I’m a bit of a technology early adopter, and sometimes find myself using new stuff that isn’t quite practical or cost-effective. Smart lighting is one area of the smart home revolution that has recently matured technologically and can be a big part of streamlining your day-to-day life, as well as increasing the beauty and comfort you can enjoy.
The punch line: smart lighting saves you time and effort
The punch line: depending on the size of your house, Smart Lighting can save you anywhere between 5 and 40 hours per year and countless instances of inconvenience (e.g., changing lighting via voice control while your hands are full). It has a fixed cost to set up (price of smart devices + installation time) but more than pays off after a couple of years. Complement it with high-quality, long-lasting LED bulb installations and you may go years without thinking about your lighting again.
Smart Lighting’s Benefits
You can automatically schedule events, like turning on your porch and backyard lights at night or on motion triggers.
Smart control gives the ability to change your lighting on a schedule or according to triggers (from motion sensors, based on the weather, etc.) Now, you don’t need to worry if you remembered to turn on your porch light to deter burglars.
Smart lighting saves electricity
Automatic scheduling also generally means more efficient electricity usage in your house. These days you should seriously consider exclusively using dimmable LED bulbs (which consume very little power and need to be replaced infrequently). Regardless of your bulb choice, electricity savings are a passive benefit that you get indefinitely. As a complement to smart lights, you can also use smart outlets to control the behavior of plug-in devices.
Scenes let you customize lighting to any situation
Running around hitting light switches is not really achieving the peak of your human potential with your time, but the average house has around 10+ light switches and possibly more in table lamps and other plug-in fixtures. On the other hand, lighting is a critical part of a functioning, practical, and beautiful space.
Smart home capability gives you the ability to, in one command, reconfigure your lighting into scenes to suit the moment.
“Lights Out”
I’ll give a simple example. My wife at first mocked my obsession with smart-rigging all of our central lighting. Since then, she’s become a big fan of: “Alexa, turn on lights out.” I’m not surprised, because it’s one of the simplest and most effective smart home commands you can implement. I’ve worked out the math and found that in our two-story house, the “lights out” command saves me around 11 hours per year (~2 minutes per night) of my grumpiest bedtime hours.
It also saves me from the need to remember to turn off lights, making space in my mind for more important things. It sets a consistent routine and ‘feel’ of our house at bedtime, by killing all main lights and providing dim lighting in the hallways. I believe this subconsciously helps with our kids to clearly signal ‘it’s bedtime’. Consistent with the principle of making life frictionless, “lights out” takes one more small stressor out of the evening. Now, I never have to get out of bed to shut off lights because the bottom floor of my house looks lit up like a Walmart.
Other ideas we’ve implemented include “all bright”, “naptime”, “movie time”— all ways to customize the lighting to suit the moment.
Setting up Smart Lighting
Smart bulbs vs. Smart Switches
You can implement smart lighting by either buying bulbs that have smart controls directly in them, or by replacing your light switches with smart versions.
Products like Lifx and Philips Hue which provide smart control embedded directly in the bulbs, so you can put the bulbs in existing fixtures. These are useful for smart controlling plug-in fixtures like table lamps. These bulbs also are known for their colorful lighting capabilities. For example, I use Philips Hue for my home entertainment setup to match the mood of video games or movies, and can also throw the lights in ‘party mode’ to create a light show for the kids.
Recommended: Use Smart Switches for Maximum Scale
For central lights where colors aren’t an issue, I strongly instead recommend using a Smart Hub with a protocol like Z-wave (e.g., Samsung SmartThings) and replacing your light switches with z-wave dimmers. This is particularly valuable for multi-room homes where the number of light fixtures is greater than 5-10. This also makes it less likely that you are handcuffed to a specific manufacturer (as you would be with Philips Hue) and you can freely mix and match devices within the Z-wave protocol. Alternatively, if you absolutely do not want a hub, you can also get Smart Switches which purely operate on Wi-Fi.
Check out these Amazon searches for Z-wave dimmer switches or Wi-fi dimmer switches. If you go Z-wave, make sure to pick up a hub. Without a hub, the switches will operate manually but you won’t be able to control them remotely and set up scenes.
Voice control your lights
While smart hubs give you control from your phone, Smart Lighting only reaches its potential with voice control. For this, I am a fan of the Amazon Echo (aka. Alexa) family of products, but you can also set up voice control through Google Assistant or Siri. You can set up relatively cheap Amazon Echo devices around your house, including by wall mounting them, so changing the lights is always within reach.
Installing smart lights
If you’re using smart bulbs, your installation is as simple as screwing in the bulbs. If it’s Philips hue, you also have to set up a hub. That’s pretty much it.
For maximum time and cost savings and convenience, you should replace your light switches instead. Replacing light switches is a fairly easy job, involving shutting off your power, removing your existing light switches, and usually wiring in line, load, neutral, and ground wires to your smart lighting control unit. If this isn’t for you, can also hire freelancers from taskrabbit.com, ThumbTack, or HomeAdvisor to install them for you—just make sure that they’re qualified for doing electrical work in your state.
Consider making the rest of your home smart
Lights are a core functionality of the household of the last 120 years, and are a natural place to start when smartifying and automating your home. But: did you know there are actually Smart Home solutions that are much easier to implement and even higher impact? Check them out in this other article on what your first Smart Home purchases should be.