As each day passes we are beginning to see and recognize how important home lighting is. Lighting used to be one of the many things people considered last when setting up their home, but as of recent lighting has become a big deal for both aesthetics and functionality in the home.
People have transmitted from just wanting any kind of light to wanting bright and every efficient light (LED lighting) and are now in a stage where they appreciate the ability to control unique lighting systems easily to suit what they want or how they feel at any time. This is where Smart Lighting comes in!
Smart lighting is a flexible lighting system used in smart homes for both indoor and outdoor areas. It involves the use of solid-state interfaces like LED for illumination, digital sensors, communication interfaces, and technology drivers.
They all interconnect to form a lighting network that can be programmed using an advanced control algorithm to produce or change light spectrum in real-time, to switch between illumination levels, and to detect both movement and sound.
Smart lighting takes away the hassle of controlling a large range of lighting networks manually. With the smart lighting system, the lighting network is programmed to respond to control according to your desires per time from a single point – An App on your phone pr a Remote Control
Benefits of Smart LED Lighting
Just in case you are wondering what it is about smart lighting that’s grabbing the attention of people and making them follow this revolutionary lighting trend, check out the following outstanding benefits of this type of lighting system.
- High-Level of Energy Efficiency: Energy efficiency is one of the reasons why people love LED lights. The fact that LED light normally uses 75% less energy compared to incandescent lighting makes it a great option
In addition to this level of energy efficiency, using LED for smart lighting makes it manage energy better. This is because, with smart lighting, you can easily dim or put off lights that you are not using at the moment. So, the only energy you use is the one you need. It gives your control so nothing has to waste.
- Serves as Security Lighting: Law enforcement and security experts now recommend smart lighting as a better security measure compared to old-fashioned timers and generic alarms.
Smart lighting can be scheduled or programmed to come on and off at particular times of the day depending on a person’s pattern of usage. It could come with motion detectors that turn on lights of particular sections of the home once motion is detected.
It is also possible to schedule the lights of different parts of your home to go off and come on at different times on different days of the week in order to confuse anyone who has bad intentions and is trying to monitor the lighting patterns.
- Lighting Customization: Smart lighting allows you to set up your lighting network the way you love it. You can switch between colors and dim or increase the brightness as you wish.
With smart lighting, you can set up the mood of your home for different activities e.g you can choose for your lighting to change from bright white to blue when it’s dinner time.
- Remote Control: With smart lighting, you don’t even need to be at home to control your home lighting. Even if you forgot to put off the light before leaving your home, you can still control it from wherever you are at any time through your phone app so energy doesn’t get wasted.
- Better Relaxation and Sleep: Blue light is known to disrupt sleep and cause a kind of alertness that might affect relaxation. However, with smart lighting, you are not stuck with only one color temperature. You can switch between different color temperatures to set the mood for relaxation and get quality sleep.
How Does Smart Lighting Work?
The idea of smart lighting might seem complicated and confusing, but as sophisticated as smart lighting seems, it is a simple and straightforward automation process.
It starts with the replacement of traditional light with LED lights (LED strips, LED neon strip, and LED linear lights). Then microprocessors, drivers, transceiver integrated circuit (wifi or Bluetooth radio), and sensory devices are connected to the luminaries.
The driver helps to power the microprocessor, transceiver, and sensors while receiving digital signals like pulse width modulation (PWM) from the microprocessor to control the lights.
The digital signal received is determined by the instructions given by an individual through an app on a smartphone or wireless network.
So there is an internet-connected hub that connects all the luminaries and serves as a gateway for the wireless connection between your smart lights and your phone or tablet where the app is.
How To Use LED Strips for your Smart Lighting Set Up
LED strips can brighten up your space and make it more beautiful. At potato lighting, we have LED strips with a wide range of colors, color temperature, and color rendering index which can be used both indoors and outdoors in your home. Using LED strips for the smart lighting setup of your home involves the use of your LED tape, a compatible driver, and a connector wire.
Follow these steps to use LED strips for your smart lighting set up
- Choose the best LED strip lights for your project to help you achieve desired results.
- Connect your LED tape to the wire connector by fixing it at the end of the tape to the clip on the wire connector.
- Peel off the adhesive at the back of your LED strip and firmly press it on the surface where you want it to be.
- Connect the second end of your connector cable to your driver.
- Plug your driver into a power source to supply power to the strips.
- Download your preferred control app to your smartphone or use the app recommended by your manufacturer
- Connect the App to your strips using Bluetooth or Wifi
Voice Smart Lighting Control
The smart lighting system now comes with an exciting option of voice control. This makes smart lighting even more fascinating and interesting. The fact that you can simply lay in your bed and command lights to come on, change colors, or reduce the brightness is amazing.
There are smart speaker systems like Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, or Home kit that allow you to control smart devices including smart lighting using voice commands. The work process is simple
- First, you install your smart lighting.
- Then you download the Alexa app or any other voice control application you want to use which is available on your smartphone.
- Set up your personal account.
- Enable the connection between your app and your lights.
- Start giving voice commands e.g “Alexa, dim the lights!”
With smart lighting, controlling the lights in your home both indoors and outdoors becomes easy and interesting. The sweet part is that you also get to save money because of the energy efficiency and long life span. So, why not smart LED lighting?
We are glad you read to this point and we hope this post was helpful.
Please ask us any questions you have in the comment section, we can’t wait to chat with you!
