Designing your smart home – bulbs

If you’re planning to replace most or all of the bulbs in your house with smart bulbs, it’s better to plan ahead and make sure you get the right bulbs for your use case. Getting this wrong can be costly or can ruin the experience due to reliability issues.

Another important part of the smart home design is, who else is using it? How onboard are they with the idea? Remember, the most important thing to consider – it needs to be easier to use than what you already have. People don’t need instructions to turn on a light and if they’ve got to learn something else then it’s not going to be accepted.

What light do you need?

Does it need to just switch on and off, for instance, an outside or garage light? Consider replacing the light switch with a smart switch (for instance a Shelly smart switch). Employing an electrician is recommended. If you are able to do this, you do so at your own risk. I’m not recommending DIY work but if you do this, make sure the supply is fully isolated and even when you’re sure the power is off, test the terminals before you work on it. Electricity can kill you.

Do you need to be able to dim the lights but not bothered about the colour tint, for instance for a hallway? Consider basic ‘white only’ smart bulbs. These can dim anywhere from off to fully on but have a white tone.

Do you need to be able to switch to warm or cold white, for instance for a study or home office? Consider ‘Ambient’ or warm white smart bulbs. These will change from a cold white ‘energising’ tone to a soft yellowy white ‘relaxing’ tone.

Do you need colour? Consider a full-colour smart bulb. These tend to be expensive and in most cases, the colour function is rarely used. Think about whether you really do need colour. It’s fun, it’s a cool thing to show people but will you use the colour function once the novelty has worn off?

Light switches

If you’re replacing bulbs with smart bulbs, you need to consider how to replace, cover over or modify your existing light switches. If the existing light switch is still in use, people will use this as they’re used to it. And if they switch it off – smart bulb or not, it’s not going to work without power.

Depending on what smart home environment or platform you’re using, you might be able to get light switches as part of a pack, or you may be able to pick up a number of Zigbee light switches for a reasonable price.

Most properties consist of 1 light per room. So, your outlay is one bulb and one switch per room. If you live in a modern house, chances are you have downlighters. These are very cheap to run, but if you’ve got multiple bulbs to a room it could be costly. For example, my living room has 11 GU10 smart bulbs. To change these over to Philips Hue ambient bulbs, I’m looking at over £200. However, for my bedroom, I have one ES light bulb. The total cost is about £25 for a Philips Hue ambient bulb.

Alternatives

If you have a complex lighting setup already (as mentioned I have 11 GU10 downlighters in my living room), then consider alternative lighting. A couple of floor standing lamps and desk lamps may be worth considering.

Brands

A visit to Currys or any other electrical retailer will suggest that Philips Hue or Hive are the market leaders. You’ll often get a starter pack that consists of a hub, two bulbs and a dimmer switch for what seems like a reasonable price. And it isn’t – at first. It’s once you start to buy more bulbs, and more light switches that it becomes costly. And if you go for another brand, then this might mean a different hub. That nice clean area near your broadband router is turning into a bunch of cables and different hubs and you’re running out of mains sockets for all of the different adapters. In many cases, the multiple hubs all support the same technology, but the vendor’s app won’t work with other bulbs.

I would avoid Philips Hue etc. mainly for the above reasons. But in addition, Philips Hue seems determined to charge well over the odds for what the bulbs actually are. Consider a non-smart bulb and a smart bulb. To make a bulb smart, the manufacturer has added some additional circuitry to receive signals and control the brightness of one or more LEDs. The cost to the manufacturer of this circuitry is a few pence at most. Philips Hue bulbs are more or less identical in function and quality to a cheap smart bulb. However, a quick search shows me that I can get a colour smart bulb from a decent brand (LIFX, TP) for around £7.99 (and as cheap as £4). The Philips Hue equivalent is £49.99, you can get a better deal buying in 2 packs, around £35 per bulb. The cheap smart bulb runs using Wifi, the Hue bulb Zigbee and Bluetooth. The communications technology in use shouldn’t be a factor. Zigbee and Wifi chips are very similarly priced – it costs a manufacturer no more to use either. I cover Philips Hue in further detail in another article.

Cheap smart bulbs

One caveat in regard to cheap smart bulbs. Many of these depend on Wifi. Some require an internet connection, some work locally to your network. If your internet is flaky, then you’re going to have times when your connection is bad, when the lights may or may not work. If they work locally, this depends on the quality of your Wifi. A ‘cheap’ ISP will normally give you an awful router for free that struggles with multiple devices. Consider a mesh Wifi solution (Google Wifi, Netgear Orbi etc) or use an ISP with a decent router (the BT owned ISPs such as BT, EE and Plusnet use a good router, and Virgin’s router also works well).

Some cheap bulbs will also depend on using the company’s own servers to operate. This locks you into their app or online service. The problem with this approach is that if the company goes out of business then your bulbs might stop working. In addition, the routing to an external service may add a lag to the operation of the switch. Tuya, an online platform that a lot of smart devices use, has recognised this and is currently enabling local control of devices. Initially, this is using services such as Home Assistant.

Wifi vs Zigbee/Z-Wave

Wifi bulbs tend to be cheaper than Zigbee or Z-Wave alternatives. There is no good reason for this – the technologies are comparable and the component count and cost are very similar. For local control and avoiding too many devices connecting to your Wifi router (particularly if your Wifi is bad) then Zigbee or Z-Wave is the way to go. If you have a number of Zigbee / Z-Wave devices already such as sensors, smart bulbs using this technology will often also function as mesh repeaters, allowing a greater range for these devices. If you’re more worried about cost, then Wifi is probably better for you.

Bluetooth is also an option that you’ll find on some devices (Philips Hue for example), but this is for direct phone to bulb control and no bridges currently work with these devices. For this reason, you’ll often see this offered as well as another communication protocol.

Conclusion

There are a number of factors to consider, both technical and behavioural when planning to install smart bulbs. There are a number of questions to ask before you even get to the point of buying the bulbs. Spending time now considering every aspect can save you weeks of frustration and possibly save you money in the long term.

Before going out and taking advantage of a good offer (for instance a starter kit), take a look at the market as a whole. Don’t necessarily stick with one brand but also look at how that brand operates their smart bulbs – are you locked into a service run by them?

For any reviews of smart bulbs I do, I will always test them locally as well as ‘online’. That way you know that they’ll still work if your internet goes down.