When you think of a smart home, smart lighting is essential and often one of the first things you should consider. It is the heart and soul of any smart home. Also, light automation has been around us for decades if not more, consider the sensor lights that you buy from your local home/hardware shop that are hanging over your garage or driveway. Another classic example of automated lights would be street lights, sorry to break it to you but someone is NOT flicking the switch ON and OFF each evening and morning, hehe.
When we talk about light automation or turning your normal lights into smart lights, I challenge you to think a step further into integration of your lights to other smart devices in your home. For example, smart security sensors controlling turning your lights on and off, your curtains and lights working together to make the most of natural light and not to leave you in the dark at night. Lights can also provide you or your family subconscious clues to do particular activities like for kids’ bedrooms at 8PM all curtains are closed, light calming music is played and lights are dimmed to 1-3% brightness or changes the colours that puts kids into sleep mode. Another example could be garden/deck lighting, security lighting or even turning off all lights when no one is home. There are endless applications and integration of the automated lights in a home. These integrations are what makes your home smart. In home automation we refer to this as scenes and scenarios, which we will explore in our next blog.
There are endless products available in the market now, some being proprietary e.g. Phillips Hue and many others use open source protocols & platforms e.g. Z-Wave. You shouldn’t just go out to the market and buy a product without designing your home automation project that delivers value right away and is also scalable to cater for your future needs. Where to start, what to choose are among one of the most frequent questions we get asked so to make things easy for all of us, we have published a blog on the very same topic, please refer to our blog on planning and designing your home automation.
So close this quick read, I would just say that these days you are only limited by your imagination on the applications of light automation to create these scenes and scenarios especially with the products being cheaper than you think. Please stay tuned for our next blog that covers details on where to begin the journey of light automation and what you should consider.