Get Started With Smart Lighting

It’s time to illuminate your home in a new way – and get the best from your bulbs

Smart lighting, we must admit, looks on the outside like little more than a gimmick.

Even now it’s had a few years to mature, the marketing surrounding the process of going smart revolves around the pretty RGB colours, and almost entirely sidesteps the more subtle and useful features of clever bulbs.

But it shouldn’t: used properly, and for the right reasons, smart lighting can absolutely transform your home.

First and foremost, let’s dispel any kind of intimidation: smart lighting is easy to get on board with. There’s no need to throw out all of your existing bulbs and start again; you can add smart bulbs to your current lighting setup piecemeal, and they’ll work alongside dumb bulbs just fine. Smart bulbs aren’t listening to you, or indeed doing anything more sinister than illuminating your home.

You won’t need to rewire anything; smart bulbs take the same power source as the regular kind, and are generally available in varieties that match common light fittings. If your chosen bulb doesn’t match up – if you need to convert an E27 bulb to an E14 bulb, for example – there are cheap screw-in adapters available that’ll do the trick. One caveat is that they often don’t play nicely with old-school dimmer switches, but they have this in common with most standard LED bulbs, and we’ve never seen a smart bulb without its own dimming functionality built in.

Finally, having smart bulbs doesn’t render your current light switches irrelevant. Yes, you’ll be able to turn your lights on and off from within an app, but any smart light worth its salt will remember its last setting when you cut the power and return to it when you restore it, so you don’t always have to open up your phone to toggle the photons.

In fact, link up your lights with HomeKit and you can do it all with your voice and a little help from Siri.