For many people, smart light bulbs are their first introduction to the world of smart home tech. They’re simple to set up and use, but there’s a lot more you can do with smart bulbs than just lighting your home.
Visual alerts
Notifications that are harder to miss
Bertel King / How-To Geek
You can use your smart home to send notifications to your phone, but like all smartphone notifications, they can be easy to miss. There’s no point having an automation that sends you a notification reminding you to take the laundry out of the washer if you don’t read it for another six hours.
Smart bulbs can give visual alerts that are much harder to miss. If the lights in your home start flashing on and off in unusual colors, you’re probably going to notice it. You can use these alerts in all sorts of ways.
You can have your lights flash or change color if someone is at the door, or if your smoke alarm triggers. You can use your smart bulbs to tell you when a kitchen timer is finished if you can’t hear the beeping from your living room. You can even use flashing lights to tell you when your phone is ringing so you don’t miss important calls.
Smart home status
Your lights become your dashboard
GE
You can also use your smart bulbs to keep you informed about the status of your home. Instead of needing a wall-mounted dashboard, your entire home can become your dashboard.
You can change the color of a smart bulb depending on whether your door is locked or unlocked, to tell you whether the washer is running or has completed its cycle, or even to tell you what the weather is going to be like.
You can use a light bulb in your bedroom to inform you whether there are any issues when you go to bed. For example, you can have your light bulb turn red in the evening if any lights or devices are still on or any doors and windows are open or unlocked. When you go to bed, you’ll instantly know if there’s anything that still needs attention.
Mimicking the sun
A much more natural alarm clock
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
You can use your smart bulbs to copy the sun’s daily pattern by starting with dim warm light and transitioning to brighter, cooler light during the day before fading back to dim warm light in the evening. Matching the natural light of the sun may help to support your body’s natural sleep-wake cycle.
Some smart lighting and smart home brands offer adaptive lighting features that will automatically change the warmth and brightness of your smart bulbs throughout the day. Your lights then automatically change without you needing to do anything.
Your smart bulbs in your bedroom can also provide you with a gentler way to wake up. Instead of being woken suddenly by an alarm, you can have your lights turn on dimly and then slowly brighten over the course of several minutes, allowing you to wake up gently.
Routine reminders
Use lights to keep you on track
Bertel King / How-To Geek
Smart bulbs are also a great way to keep on top of routines. One of the most effective ways I’ve used smart bulbs in my own home was to stop my son from coming out of his room too early and waking us up. I set up his smart bulb to turn blue when he was allowed to leave his room in the morning, and it worked really well, allowing us to get much more sleep than previously.
You can also use smart bulbs as a visual Pomodoro timer. You can have your light set to a bright focus scene for 25 minutes, and then turn green to indicate that it’s time for a five-minute break. When it returns to the focus scene, you know it’s time to start working again.
Protecting your property
Appear home when you’re not
Nanoleaf
As a child, I had the idea for light bulbs that would turn on and off when you were away to fool burglars into thinking someone was home. I assumed that I’d live happily off the billions that my invention would make me. Sadly, I wasn’t the only person who had this idea.
Smart bulbs can easily make this a reality. You can set your lights to turn on and off on a schedule when you’re away to make it appear that you’re at home.
If you use Home Assistant, there’s an even better way. The Presence Simulation integration records the patterns of how you use your lights over time, and automatically replicates those patterns when you’re away from home, so you don’t even need to set up the scheduling yourself.
Smart bulbs are a great way to dip your toe into the smart home world. They can be relatively cheap and can be a lot more useful than you might imagine. When you think of a clever way to use them, it can be a literal light bulb moment.
