The Benefits of Smart Lighting in the Home

Lighting is one of the most important considerations when it comes to interior design. You want to make sure that your home is well lit in certain places and that you have just the right amount of light in others, but over the years we’ve been restricted to a small number of colour options.

We’ve also been relatively restricted in terms of what we can do with our home lights with them either on, dimmed or off. Fortunately, lighting technology has evolved and we now have a fantastic range of smart lighting systems that enable us to control individual bulbs or those located around the world via the various compatible smart home controls such as the Apple HomeKit, Google Home and Amazon Echo.

Smart lighting can be controlled using various smartphones, tablets and even desktop computers; and of course there are the manual controls should you wish to make any adjustments. However, the best thing about smart homes and smart lighting systems is the ability to make changes at the touch of a button from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Here we’ll run through some of the benefits of smart lighting in the home to help you to understand more about the systems themselves, how they work and just what is making them so popular with those looking to save money and make improvements to the look and feel of their homes.

Most people have left the house, gone to work and returned home to discover that they’ve left a lamp on in the bedroom having got ready in a hurry or that a light has been left on in the bathroom perhaps. With smart lighting if you’re even slightly concerned that you’ve left a light on you can go on the app, find the light in question and turn it off with a simple tap on the screen.

Leaving lights on throughout the day when they’re not needed can end up costing a lot of money in electricity bills – and imagine how much it could be if you’re away on holiday for a week! Some of the most energy efficient smart light bulbs are estimated to be around 80% more efficient than typical household light bulbs meaning that you can save a sizable amount of money when you need them on as well as when you switch them off from anywhere with Internet access.

You’re not longer forced to have either a white or coloured light bulb. Smart light bulbs use LEDs that can be adjusted using the app on your phone or tablet so that it can change colour whenever you want it to.

If you’re having a themed party you can adjust the colour of each light individually or change the feel of a whole room if you wish, or you can change the bulb colour to give you an authentic cinema or football ground feel if you wish – go where the mood takes you!

You can also programme the lights to come on gradually if you wish, getting brighter as time goes by. There is nothing worse than waking up in the morning and switching on the light only to be dazzled by the bright lights as your eyes adjust. With smart light bulbs you can make this a thing of the past by turning your lights on slowly with your alarm as you gradually rise from your slumber.

Best of all is that you can save the colour configurations so that you can get the exact setup again the next time you want it.

It’s natural to worry about people approaching or breaking into your home while you’re away on holiday. Thieves can often tell when a house is unoccupied for any length of time, but you can do your best to deter them by programming your smart lighting to come on as it goes dark for a few hours in the evening, giving the impression that someone is home even when you’re thousands of miles away.

Through smart home technology you can even combine this function with smart security systems like video doorbells and home CCTV cameras which can be synced to your phone and provided that you have an Internet connection you can look at each of the cameras to ensure that everything is okay while you relax on the beach.

There are all kinds of possibilities when it comes to smart lighting setups, and you can adapt yours according to the time and situation if you wish. In the case of the fantastic and innovative Philips Hue wireless lighting system you can program each of the bulbs in your setup and store the colour in the memory of your system ready for a party or you can adapt the colours when you’re watching a film on the television at home.

The Wi-Fi connected bridge controls the whole Philips Hue system and you can connect as many as 50 individual bulbs and colour configurations at one time enabling you to program them to come on as a group or one-by-one, even by room so they’re ready to brighten your home when you arrive or to get you into the party spirit ready for your guests.

In the case of Philips Hue smart light bulbs each bulb could last for up to 15 years or 15,000 hours of use, depending on which one comes first. In comparison the standard light bulbs that you may have in your home at the moment last for between 1,000 and 2,000 hours before they need changing.

If you think about how often you have to change each of the standard light bulbs in your home – even the more energy efficient ones – you’re possibly looking at changing each one once a year, so just think of the savings you’ll be making there on top of the efficiencies!

Learn more about the full range of smart home lighting systems and products at BT Shop today.