Smart Lights: How They Work and Where to Place them in Your Home

Are you ready to upgrade your smart home, but don’t know quite where to start? Are you looking for even more ways your smart speaker can help you run your home? Maybe even an inexpensive, easy way to add some entertainment to your everyday life? Look no further: the experts are here to help.

Smart lights are an easy addition to any home. They’re an easily installed added safety feature for your home: inexpensive, universally compatible, and guaranteed more fun to use than the lights you have now (seriously). 

You have the power to turn any boring light source into a dimmable, voice-activated, remotely controlled personal light servant. Let’s explore how.

What are smart lights?

Smart lights (or smart bulbs) look like regular light bulbs.  They function like any other LED bulb and can be controlled with normal light switches but are also fully operational through your ADT mobile app, your connected smart speakers, or even your smartwatch.

Installing a smart light

Smart lights screw into any regular light fixture, making installation a breeze. ADT smart lights are Z-wave compatible, like many other smart home devices, and just need to be connected through the mobile app. Other smart lights can connect to your devices with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Where should I put my smart lights?

We know, the temptation to replace every light fixture in your house with smart lighting is incredible. But you have to start somewhere, right? We recommend the following places first:

Bedroom

You know that horrible feeling when you pull back the covers, climb into bed, feel that wave of relief and comfort and then realize that the lights are still on? The walk of shame from under the covers to the light switch and back is over, friends. Somewhere along the way, smart home experts decided that it’s the 21st century and we should not have to get out of bed to turn off the lights anymore. Now, you can use your phone, smartwatch, or your smart speaker (we’re compatible with both the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant) to perform this dreaded chore for you: technology is the best, isn’t it?

Fast forward to 8 hours (good for you!) later. It’s time to rise and shine, but you aren’t quite ready for the full wattage of your bedroom light yet. Prepare yourself for this: you can now program your lighting system to wake you up gently. 

Set a schedule unique to each day of the week. Have your smart light bulb turn on at 15% brightness while you fumble for your alarm, then reach 30% as you pull yourself out of your dream. By the time you get out of bed, your lights can be at 60%. Then 75% while you get ready for the day. We understand if you’re the kind of person that needs that electric shock of a wake-up to 750 lumens, but doesn’t this gentle wake-up routine sound way more fun?

Front Porch

There’s something wonderful (and safe) about never coming home to a dark driveway. If you install smart lights on your front porch, you can program them to always turn on at a certain time, to be ready to greet you at the end of a long workday or a night out. Then, as the seasons change or daylight-saving time hits, you can easily change your preferences from the ADT mobile app.

The other benefit of having smart lights on your front porch is being able to turn them on and off from anywhere. You could be across the country, remember you were supposed to keep the light on for the plant sitter, and -boom- it's done. 

You could be in the middle of a staff meeting at work, remember that you needed to turn off the lights before you left, and click them off right then and there. All of this means that your lights are on when you want them on, and off when you want them off. It sounds simple, but how many people can say that this is always the case?

Living room

As the safety and security experts around town, this one might be our favorite. Installing smart lighting in your living room has two huge safety benefits, and one, less important but still cool, entertaining benefit. Oh, you want to hear the entertaining benefit first? Well, alright.

Movie theaters are going out of style. Leaving home, to drive across town, to pay $50 for tickets and snacks and soda, to then sit in a room full of strangers that you can’t always trust to keep quiet during the best parts of the movie... it just isn’t as appealing as snuggling into the couch with homemade goodies and watching your favorite streaming service. 

Smart lights allow you to bring a little more movie theater magic to your at-home cinematic experiences. Just imagine dimming all the lights in the living room to mimic that 15 minutes of anticipation before the grand reveal of the feature presentation, then going totally dark for dramatic effect when it starts. When you have to pause (because you can pause, because you’re home) for a restroom break, you can turn the lights back up a little bit without getting blinded. It’s ingenious, we know.

Now let’s talk safety! First, a well-lit house can be a deterrent to burglars, even if you’re not home. Installing Smart LED Light Bulbs throughout your home lets you set schedules to control your lighting remotely. Never again arrive to a dark home, and make sure any burglars don’t either. We recommend your living room because using a communal space in your house can give the impression that multiple people are home.

Secondly, you can set your smart lights to automatically come on if your ADT smoke detector is triggered. If the worst happens, and a fire starts in the middle of the night, you want everyone in your home to be able to see their way out. 

All quips aside, this is a lifesaving move. Install smart lights in the parts of your home that need to be lit in case of emergency. This could mean in and around the stairway, in the hall outside everyone’s bedrooms, and definitely in the areas where pets sleep. We’ll always be there to help in the event of an emergency, but it will give your entire household a head start if you can see what’s going on.

ADT customers enjoy all the added convenience and security of this modern technology, backed by expert installation and 24/7 monitoring. If you’d like to upgrade your home security system and add smart lights to your smart home lineup, you can learn more here.

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