Or I could change the wall switch to be smart, costing me $45 in total. If I wanted to upgrade this to have smart functionality, I could either pay $45 each for Hue color spotlights – costing $540 in total. This might leave you wondering what they point of them are (considering that smart bulbs support on/off, dimming and color changes) – but a good example of why switches can be better is my kitchen/dining room. They tend to just support turning the linked light on and off. Smart switches also nearly always require a neutral wire, which not all houses have, and most smart switches don’t support dimming. They therefore need to be wired in to your house and thus require some level of electrical competence to install. Smart switches replace the standard ‘dumb’ switch on your wall, and they mainly work with standard ‘dumb’ bulbs – allowing them to be turned on and off in a smart way. How smart switches work Marketing image for the Leviton Decora Smart WiFi 15 Amp Light Switch In this case, smart switches can be more useful – and much cheaper. However the truth is also that for some rooms, you just want to smartly turn lights on and off. Video can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Livingroom with Philips Hue ()Īs a result, I’m personally a big fan of smart lighting. An awesome of this can be seen on YouTube: Fun stuff like syncing to music or a movie! Some (but not all) smart bulbs allow you to sync your lighting to music or movies, such as frequently dimming and brightening bulbs (and changing the color) to match the music or the movies.Scenes can be awesome for creating mood lighting in various rooms of your house. This can then be triggered in the app or with a voice command to your smart speaker. Many smart bulbs allow you to configure ‘scenes’, which is where you configure one or more of your bulbs to go to a particular color and brightness. This is all trivial to setup with supported smart devices ( Nest cameras excluded, unfortunately!). For example, some people turn their lights on for 10 minutes after their Ring cameras detect motion (or their Ring doorbell is pressed). You can set smart bulbs to go on/off (or change color) at set times of day, or even link it with other smart devices. You can turn the bulbs off at the wall if you’d like ( without damaging the smart bulb), but you can do this by using your smartphone app, using a voice assistant like an Echo or Google Home device, or do this automatically based on time, sunset or sunrise. This is actually what I do with my landing smart bulb at night: use it as a night-light as I have young children. Pretty much all smart bulbs allow you to turn down the brightness of the bulbs, all the way down to essentially a night-light setting. Dimming capability (without extra wiring needed – yay!).Many smart bulbs support full RGB color, meaning you can set your bulbs to bright pink or orange if you’d like! Whilst some other smart bulbs only support white or ‘white ambiance’, meaning they can be set to bluey and yellowy colors to track natural day and night cycles. The ability to change the color of them.Whilst some smart bulbs work over WiFi ( such as LIFX) and other bulbs work over ZigBee or Bluetooth ( such as Philips Hue), in general smart bulbs offer the same sort of features: Then you download the relevant app and start playing around with them: changing their color, dimming them to 5% brightness and back up to 100% brightness, and turning them off randomly to confuse other people in the house! After all, they just screw into an existing light socket and they turn on. Smart bulbs are one of the easiest smart devices to get set up with. A genuine smart home will actually end up with a mix of both smart bulbs and switches – not just one or the other.ĥ) The best uses for smart bulbs and switches How smart bulbs work How I got started with smart lighting: a starter kit and four E14 candle bulbs. The decision of whether to get a smart bulb or smart switch is very much dependant on people’s requirements and the room they’ll be used in. Hence I wanted to write this post and go through when it’s best to buy smart bulbs vs switches, and when it’s best to mix the two. However in other cases, a smart bulb is better to buy – especially as mood lighting, or when you want dimming capability. there are some instances where a simple smart switch is all that people actually need. Whilst smart bulbs are much easier to sell to people (“You can set them to bright orange, and dim them too!!”). Mkay… that’s helpful! In reality, there can be some truth to this statement. Whenever I see newcomers to smart homes ask what the best smart bulb to buy is, I often see one or two replies saying “ Noooo, smart bulbs are POINTLESS!! Just get smart switches instead!!“.Īnd then they say nothing else to back up this view point.
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