What’s so Special About Smart Home Lighting?
Smart Home Lighting
Lighting has been an important element in any home for centuries. It’s a necessity at night time but it also adds character to a home as it not only complements the interior design but ensures areas are well-lit.
Smart Light Bulbs and So Much More
You may have experimented with a few smart bulbs around the home and already know how they can transform the ambience of a room. Smart lights add an extra layer of convenience to your home, allowing you to adjust and control the brightness of your lights from anywhere, whether you’re at home or far away.
With advances in technology, we’re now able to control lighting remotely and automate it based on what we want to achieve. Smart home automation gives us complete control over the colour, intensity and timing of both natural and artificial light around the home. An automated lighting system works best when it uses both lights and blinds to maximise the use of natural light.
Mood Lighting
The ability to change the colour or brightness of your lighting is a great feature that allows you to set the tone of your environment. You can create a cosy atmosphere by dimming lights or adjusting the brightness according to what’s happening in the room. You can create a party atmosphere in the kitchen or set functional lighting for cooking. A smart home system gives you control over all aspects of your living environment.
Smart Lighting Systems
A smart home lighting system from S.M.S. uses Control4 software and custom, labelled lighting panels to activate a range of pre-customised lighting scenes. Connecting smart light strips, ceiling fixtures, lamps and other smart lights, a smart lighting control system offers many advantages over conventional lighting. It is generally operated by smart keypads instead of conventional wall switches with all the dimming control carried out from a centralised dimming panel hidden away in your garage or utility room. Meaning fewer dimmer switches cluttering up your walls.
What benefits does an S.M.S. smart lighting system offer?
Instantly Change the Ambience
Through the power of smart home technology, you’re able to instantly change the way the lighting affects your home. You can activate blinds to reduce natural light levels, change the colour of your artificial lights, dim or brighten lights or switch to different lights – all at the press of a button or via scheduled settings. This can instantly alter the mood and atmosphere within a room.
Convenient
Remember when we said “all at the press of a button”? This is what makes smart home lighting so convenient. So long as you’ve got an internet connection, you can remote control lights in your home from anywhere in the world, which means no more running around to turn all the lights off just before bed.
Even better, a smart speaker and voice assistant gives you voice control over your smart bulbs. With just a simple voice command you can turn the lights on and off, change the colour or activate lighting scenes, leaving your hands free to complete whatever task you were doing.
You can even programme lights to come on when it detects your smartphone device is approaching the home.
In Sync with the home
Natural light varies throughout the day and can often be out of our control. Blinds can be automated to close at a certain time or be programmed according to the levels of light detected from outside. Light from the sun can also generate heat and as such, blinds can also be automated to close when the room temperature is too high, to stop the sun from warming the room even further. If your house has a lot of windows, automated blinds will allow you to use your time much more effectively, instead of closing all the blinds manually.
As they are part of the same home automation system, the lights can be programmed to activate when the blinds are closed. Because the lights and blinds are connected to the same inputs, they’re both fully in sync with the home, providing convenience and the ability to seamlessly move from night to day making the most of available light.
Light systems can be linked to motion sensors throughout the house and will activate when motion is detected. Depending on the time of day or night, the lights can have varying degrees of intensity. For example, getting up during the night to use the bathroom. It’s dark and the light switch is usually hard to locate. A motion detector could turn on the light in the hallway for you but only at 10% intensity, so you aren’t overwhelmed by the bright light.
Energy Saving
Another benefit to smart home lights is that they will save you energy. Smart home lighting can save you a minimum of 10% and potentially over 20% on your energy costs and here’s why.
A smart lighting system allows you to turn all the lights in the house off via a single button press or voice command as you leave the house. This means no more lights left on all day or all night.
With motion detection or scheduled lighting activated, your lights will only be used when they are needed. This makes your lights more efficient and will save you energy.
Increase your chances of saving energy by using economical, long-lasting bulbs that can last up to 15 times longer than standard bulbs.
Security Benefits
Enhanced control over lights in the home is also a security benefit as you can create the illusion that the home is occupied. Holiday mode lighting turns lights on around the house when you are away to give the impression you are still at home.
Security enhancement will also turn on lights around the house in the event of a fire or intruder alarm activation.
Get started with a smart home
To begin your smart home transformation, head to our configurator to select from a range of smart home equipment, including lighting systems. The configurator will allow you to specify your own system and provide accurate and instant pricing.
Learn more here.
