What You Should Know About Smart Lights Before You Fill Your Home with Them

Switching to smart lighting is one of the best decisions you can make. From light bulbs to light switches to wall panels, smart lighting has the ability to complement every room in your house. As smart lighting continues to grow in popularity, there are an increasing number of new options available on the market. It's easy to be tempted to fill your entire home with these smart lights.

And you should! With benefits like cost savings, automated vacation-mode lighting to prevent burglaries, color-changing light bulbs, and integrated Bluetooth speakers that allow you to play music from your lighting fixtures, there is so much you can do with your smart lighting devices. Probably even more than you realized. This is why smart lighting can be overwhelming for a lot of people.

So, before you go filling your shopping cart, you should understand the ins and outs of smart lighting not only to ensure you're buying the best products on the market, but so that you can seamlessly integrate them into your existing infrastructure.

Brief rundown on what you should know

Picking a platform

The first thing you should ask yourself before buying smart lights is what platform you want to use to control them. A number of devices come with their own control apps, but you'll eventually want to smarten up more than just your lighting fixtures. With this in mind, you'll want to consider a more comprehensive platform that will be able to handle your smart lights alongside the other devices you'll end up integrating in the future.

Most people pair their smart lights with voice assistants like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, or Google Assistant. When everything is interconnected, you are not only able to control your lighting, but everything in your home — thermostats, cameras, security systems — will be interconnected.

Don't be afraid of price

People are so afraid that smart lighting will drain their bank accounts, but this just isn't the case. After government subsidies for smart lights hit the market in 2014, it brought so many new options to the table. Like any industry, more competition brought down prices and created an influx in innovative products. Now, LED light bulbs are cheaper and better than ever before.

Overhead shot of woman reading on the couch

The opportunities are endless

If you're still wondering if smart lighting will complement your lifestyle, consider all you can do with these devices:

You can get a better night's sleep by programming your lights to gradually fade out before you go to bed and/or slowly turn on to wake you up in the morning
You can use the color-changing features to alert you to various signals — blue if there is rain in the forecast, red if you get an email from your boss, and yellow if the CDC releases a new COVID-19 update
You can set different lighting for your daily activities, like mood lighting when you're watching a movie or brighter lighting when you're reading a book
You can play your favorite song from all the lighting fixtures around your house while you're cleaning so you can perfectly hear the audio no matter what room you're in

There are so many more possibilities than this. But one of smart lighting's biggest perks is that everything is customizable so that it can fit into your unique lifestyle.

Now that you know a little bit more about smart lighting, you can start thinking about how you can utilize these devices within your current setup. And to see what available options are out there for you, start browsing our Artika and Artika Smart products today.