If you want to make your home a little bit smarter, a great place to start is with your light. I have set up so my life turned on just before sundown that way. I’m never left sitting in the dark.
But there are a ton of systems out there and some are going to be a huge headache. So if you’re going to good system number one it has to be easy to set up. Number two it has to be easy to use day to day. Remember these are more convenient than lights. Third, it has to be really flexible. You have to have a lot of options for how you can set up in your home.
There is no perfect smart light as right now but the one that comes closest to nailing all three of those things is Philips Hue. It named smart lights and for good reason. It’s just easy to set up and it’s basically just plugging everything in and you’re good to go. Its app is a big part of that and you can control entire rooms or individual lights without digging through menus that if you just turn the lights on and off. You can dim them by driving around us wider also lets you set up triggers that your lights can respond to what’s happening. So they can turn on when you come to the home or off when you’re leaving and if you want to get you in early about it. You can pick up the light see if this then that and then have them respond to all kinds of good things you could have your lights change color when it’s about to rain or you have them flash. If you get a new text message or work Facebook like or an Instagram or a slack message or email or you know don’t get carried away.
Hue also works with Siri and Alexa’s you can control your entire homes life system with your voice just by talking to your iPhone or your Amazon echo for me the one downside to Philips who is that you can put up to a light switch. So if you turn your light switch off you suddenly came from Chile the lights their easy one solution though Philips does sell these light controllers that you can mount on the wall. They work pretty well and they’re convenient.
Oh and I should mention that like most lighting systems Hue also offersSmart Light for your Home – Philips Hue bunch of different colors. You can do like that or just plain old white or you can you want to do basically and a different color from white to purple to red to green to whatever you should just consider whether you really need a purple White House. The thing that I like the most is something that’s a little bit in between the two of them. It’s a white boulder could be a little bit warmer or a little bit colder. So you can still sort of dial in on your exact preference.
There are a lot of other smart lighting options out there and I’m going to quickly run through them because some of them are kind of interesting. LIFX color 1000 is a nice color shining bold that’s really great. If you just want one or two but it doesn’t require. Just know that if your LIFX buyers a little patchy they might be a problem.
How to buy and setup these smart lights?