Smart Lights For Your Smart Home

I had the pleasure of speaking to smart home expert David Webster a couple of times over the last few months and he shared a great deal of knowledge about smart lighting.

Whether you’re a complete newbie to smart home technology just thinking about how to get started with smart lighting, or a seasoned expert, I think you’ll find David’s ideas interesting and helpful.

Honestly, my notes below really don’t do the conversation justice, so I would encourage you to watch or listen to the conversations (we did it in two parts) if this is a topic that you’re interested in.

Smart Bulbs vs Smart Switches

David mentions that if you’re renting, you might really not have much of a choice and might just have to go with smart bulbs.

When it comes to which technology to choose for your smart bulbs, David warns against using Wifi bulbs and suggests that Zigbee might be a better choice.

Motion Sensors or Presence Sensors?

As David points out, motion sensors work well until such time as you would like them to turn back off. There might might also be problems with motion sensors if someone else is already in bed and sleeping if you’re only using a motion sensor, whereas a presence sensor would give you more flexibility to setup a more advanced automation so that lights don’t come on under some situations (like if someone is sleeping).

Lighting Design

In any kind of environment you might have ambient lighting, accent lighting, task lighting and perhaps also kinetic lighting.

The key is having multiple different light fixtures able to be controlled using “scenes”, either from a single button press or by voice.

This is far easier than trying to run around your home and manually set all of your different lights the way you want them for what you want to do.

Scenes vs Zones for Smart Lighting

Scenes and zones work together and you could have a scene work with just a single zone. But, according to David, scenes really come into their own when when you start using scenes with multiple zones.

Although you can make things as complex as you like, but David suggests trying to keep things somewhat simple. A good rule of thumb is that automations should be helpful and not a hinderence. Personally speaking, I think this is good advice for me to hear knowing my propensity to create dozens of different automations.

As David says, never automate anything that doesn’t also have a manual control.

Seriously, if this is a topic that you’re interested in diving into more deeply, you really need to watch or listen to the conversation.

You can watch on Youtube or listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about Automated Home here.