Give your home a smart lighting makeover

Smart lighting is more than just turning on and off a light bulb. With the right approach — and the right smart lights — you can change the look of every room in your home. Here’s what you need to know if you’re just starting your smart lighting journey.

What exactly makes a light “smart”?

Your typical old light bulb—whether the increasingly rare, wasteful incandescent or the more modern LED—really only knows two things: when it's on, it has to get brighter, and when the power goes out, the light gets brighter. You can control it with a switch on the wall, but aside from those dimmers that are very easy to break, there's really not much intelligence at all.

Smart bulbs, on the other hand, can communicate with the home network and each other, enabling a wide range of lighting possibilities. There are usually only a few simple communication standards at work here, with most bulbs using standard Wi-Fi and Zigbee low-power communications to manage their functions. This communication is crucial because it allows not only features such as voice activation, but also scheduling, intelligent grouping and dimming, changes in color modes, and coordination with home security systems.

Can I use different light bulbs from different manufacturers in my home?

You can certainly install smart lighting products from different manufacturers in your home and use them as light bulbs, but unfortunately there is no industry standard that allows different bulbs to "talk" to each other or coordinate lighting effects. Therefore, at this time, it is a good idea to choose a brand for simple lighting and stick with it.

But that doesn’t mean that if a particular manufacturer makes a light panel, lamp, or bulb that particularly appeals to you, you shouldn’t buy it, as there are ways to overcome the lack of integration standards for smart home lighting.

The easiest way to do this is to make sure the smart bulbs you buy are supported by voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, or Apple's Siri/Homekit. If you can add them to your voice assistant's app or package, then you can definitely live in a multi-brand house, because you'll rarely need to use their specific apps to control your lights. You can just say "Hey, Assistant name, turn on the kitchen and living room lights," and you'll get the lighting you want, even if they're different brands of bulbs. You'll miss out on some neat syncing features if you stick to one brand, though.

So what functions does smart lighting have?

The most basic unit of smart lighting is the smart bulb. There are many newer brands on the market, as well as established players like Philips Hue or LIFX.

Smart bulbs usually come in either Edison/E27 screw-on models or bayonet/B22-style models. If you're not sure which type of bulb you currently have in your home, it's as simple as turning off the light socket -- this is important, because electric shock is no joke -- unscrewing the bulb and checking the end of the bulb. If it's a regular screw, it's an Edison/E27, while if it has raised prongs that you just twist to hold it in place, it's a bayonet/B22 style.

You can also buy fixtures that work with many downlight styles that have smart lighting features, although these are generally a bit more expensive than their E27/B22 counterparts.

There aren't a lot of smart lighting options available in standard lighting, from light strips to lamps to path lights.

If you want to build smart lighting that's truly your own design, consider the Nanoleaf Light Panel System, which lets you build wall panels from simple geometric shapes into any pattern you want. With smart lighting, you're not limited to the existing fixtures in your home. Nanoleaf's biggest selling point is syncing with your entertainment, whether that's through complimentary lighting that reflects your screen experience or creating rhythmic effects that match the music of your choice.

What can I do with smart lights to improve my home?

At the simplest level, you can more completely automate your lighting without ever having to touch a light switch again. Whether you prefer an app-based approach (most smart lighting systems work primarily on iOS or Android devices) or voice commands, it's a very liberating way to have the lights come on before you enter a room, or to make sure all the lights are off when you go to bed to save energy.

Most smart lights also have some level of dimming built into the bulb, which means you can change the lighting effect in a given room even if you don't have a dimmer switch installed. This is great for watching movies, but if you have very young children who have a hard time sleeping in a completely dark room, you can set the lights to dim over time to help them out. One thing to note: if you have a dimmer switch, most smart bulbs will recommend that you either undo the switch or never touch them, as they handle dimming completely differently than smart bulbs, which can cause problems with your bulbs.

You know how different "white light" bulbs can be used to mimic the effects of old-school incandescents or more modern fluorescent tubes? The same is true with smart lights, but to a much greater degree. Very basic lights will simply mimic the standard warm white setting of most common bulbs, but there are a lot of variations on a single bulb. Many products include circuitry that allows for full RGBLED lighting effects, which means that in most cases the same bulb that normally provides standard white light can be turned bloody red for a Halloween party, red for a romantic Valentine's Day dinner, or anything else that captures your imagination. Because they can change color, they can also serve as impromptu disco lights, or be set to subtly change color at sunset to emphasize the way they illuminate a room over time.

If you’re creative with your home decor choices, you can use smart lighting to achieve striking effects, whether that’s providing complimentary colour to a feature wall, subtle lighting for indoor plants, or mood lighting for a cooler experience.

Smart lighting can also play a big role in home security. In the old-fashioned way, using those scary ticking timer switches attached to light fixtures, you can easily set up lighting schedules for your house to make it look like you're home, or use smart sensors to flash lights to make any unwanted lurkers think twice about approaching your property. Of course, the same lights can also make your life simpler at home, and you can easily set up geolocation features on your phone to have your smart lights functions activate when you enter and leave your residence.