Endless opportunities
Smart lights have been on the rise in the past years. They offer a customisability which we could only dream of in the days of the good old light bulb.
There are endless smart light solutions out there, most of them are not as smart as they claim to be, but let’s start from the beginning.
Two major things decide how much you can do with your smart lights – their hardware capabilities and the accompanying software which enables you to really use those theoretical capabilities.
Things to look out for in regards to the hardware
– fitting and form factor
Next to the maximum brightness, the form factor often gets neglected. It makes all the difference if you have to look directly into a tiny light bulb to get your desired bright light intensity, or if you have a big diffuse panel your eyes have no problem looking at directly. We recommend indirect lighting for most use cases, especially in the evening.
– light spectrum & color accuracy
Almost all smart lights are based on LED-technology, which traditionally has a suboptimal light spectrum it can reproduce. This in turn can lead to fatigue and unnatural colors. Thankfully, more and more suppliers also share their “CRI” value, which indicates how closely the light imitates the real sunlight spectrum. The maximum value is 100, but anything above CRI 90 can be considered good quality.
– light temperature
Many smart lights can change the temperatur of their lights, look for keywords like “tuneable white”, “CCT (correlated color temperature)” or “HCL (human centric lighting)”. In general, anything around or beneath 3000K is considered warm white and anything above 5000K is considered cold white (sunlight is at about 5600K). Use warm white in the evening (at minimum brightness) and cold white in the morning.
– maximum and minimum brightness
The maximum light output of a light source is measured in lumen (lm), and this is what most people will consider as the most important thing, while neglecting the dimming capabilities. Some light controllers only offer a given set of dimming steps, others start off really bright – not ideal if you want to use them as an alternative to candles. A good range for a light bulb would be 1 – 1500 lm, which would replace a 100W incandescend bulb.
– Ecosystem expandability
We really like to be able to still use “normal” wall switches, even with smart lighting implemented, so look for systems that give you the option to do that (although you should be safe if you buy products which are able to communicate with “Alexa” or “Google Home”). This will also give you the full list of possibilities of home automatisation, if you are into that – welcome to the world of smart home!
Things to look out for in regards to the software
It is up to you if you want to automate your home with one of the various smart home systems out there, but we would advise you to choose a system with the folowing capabilities:
– automatic dimming during the day
This concept is called “human centric lighting (HCL)” and is marketed as something really new, while we are actually going back to our lighting roots. HCL tries to mimic the outside light ambience, giving you bright cold light in the morning and dimming your lights automatically to a soft warm white in the evening. While we are glad this is getting more available, it is far from being a standard.
– light alarm clock feature
Imagine your whole house is already bathed in bright light when you wake up – that can really make getting out of bed so much easier. Many suppliers offer this feature already, and there are also some DIY methods to get this done, if you are interested – click here.
Overall, the Philips Hue Ecosystem has got you covered for most use cases. They are easy to integrate, offering a robust software which can operate on it’s own (although you will have to buy their own hub/bridge to make it work! – for a DIY solution with HCL click here), but let’s you integrate their lights into any smart home control system (e.g. Alexa, Google Assistent, …). At the time of this writing, the only thing they are still missing is a good HCL implementation, as described above in “things to look out for”.
We have also experimented with some cheaper hardware, which only comes with basic software functionality, but can be integrated into most smart home systems to really leverage it’s capabilities. So for those who already have an ecosystem and/or don’t mind setting things up themselves and do not want to spend too much on hardware, we can recommend looking into the “MiLight” Brand, as they offer a large variety of lights with decent specs (similar to Philips Hue, but more affordable).
Philips Hue
The most common smart light around.
Milight
The more affordable, more diy alternative.