Lighting is hugely important in any home. Natural lighting through large, clear windows provides diffuse, natural (wide spectrum) lighting that enables colours to be seen as they should be is easy on the eyes. When the sun has gone down, stylish lighting can be used to create an atmosphere or provide lighting for specific tasks. Getting the right quality and amount of light is important.
There are many types of lighting available in the smart home and it is worth considering all your options before you purchase hardware to automate your existing and future lighting. Most people assume the option is either smart bulbs or smart switch modules (or both) but this is far from being the case. Neither will meet all your requirements or provide the best possible user experience. You also don't have to automate every light in your house!
There is also no one technology or vendor that can meet all of your lighting requirements. If you try to go down this route, you will be make major compromises in terms of performance, style and user experience. A multi-technology, multi-vendor installation will also be considerably cheaper.
Before we even consider automation, we choose the style of lighting and lighting fixture we want to install in each particular location, with no compromises made or assumed based on technology that will be used to control it. This allows stylish lighting and lighting fixtures to be installed from many vendors. The only factor we consider at this stage is whether we want each light or cluster of lights to have colour changing capability, be dimmable or simply switch on and off. We are basically separating the lighting infrastructure from the control infrastructure.
Binary lighting is lighting that has a fixed brightness and can simply be switched on or off. This is the most common type of light fixture used in most homes because of its simplicity.
Dimmable lighting is lighting that has allows control of the brightness. This obviously requires a more complex controller and a suitable user interface to allow user control of brightness.
Colour changing lighting is lighting that has allows control of the colour and brightness. This requires and advanced controller and a suitable user interface to allow user control of brightness and colour.
There is no such thing as a smart bulb, well not that we've seen yet. Anything currently described as a "smart bulb" is at best a networked bulb or a remotely controlled bulb. There is nothing smart inside them. What they do well though is to expose a control interface via an API to enable remote control and home automation.
One of the key elements of a great smart home user experience is low latency. This is why all of our lighting control uses our local network and is not via cloud APIs or services. We also don't want any dependencies on our Internet connectivity or those cloud-based features. This means that with third-party smart bulbs such as Philips Hue, our Home Control System communicates directly with the hub on our home network.
We have quite a few issues with smart bulbs and we are not big fans of them:
There are many cheaper smart bulbs on the market these days but they are not necessarily better value for money. Many will have a much shorter lifetime and the amount of light output is typically much lower. The quality of light output is also usually lower.
We use LIFX lighting and this technology has been integrated with our smart home to use our technology abstraction and lighting models. The bulbs are quite expensive but they have high light output and very good colour ranges.
Our preferred smart bulbs are from the Philips Hue lighting range and this technology has been integrated with our smart home to use our technology abstraction and lighting models. Philips bulbs are not as good as LIFX in terms of the range of colours achievable but they are good enough for our trequirements.
Companies like Fibaro sell 'switch modules' which are designed to fit in the pattress box behind existing light switches. These typically allow the switches to function as normal but also enable automation as well.
A qualified electrician should be used to fit these modules.
Smart switches often come with a number of limitations, which you need to look out for:
These are separate control modules that don't necessarily have an interface for switches to be connected. The assumption is that separate interfaces and control are used. These are typically used with RGB and RGBW LED lighting strips but we also use them for other style of lighting.
We also use lamp switch modules to control lighting in our @smartest_home. These are designed to sit between a lamp plug and the mains socket. They are available in both binary (on/off) and dimmable versions.
Sometimes a lighting product catches our eye that defies our normal categorisations. The Tittle Light is one example we have in our home. With products like these you are limited to the control interfaces provided by the vendor.
We have also developed our own dynamic smart lighting.
It is important that you choose lighting that is bright enough and has sufficient light output. Light bulb output is typically stated in Lumens (Wikipedia) but light bulbs can have very different light distribution patterns. Down lighters and spot lights typically have a narrow 'beam' light pattern.
With smart bulbs and other smart lighting that enable brightness control, the consistency of the control is also important. Some bulbs cannot dim particularly low and at the lower brightness levels the rate of brightness change can also look odd.
The way the human eye perceives brightness is very complex and is it far from being linear. This means that brightness controls need to work in an intrusive way, relative to the way humans perceive brightness or the user experience is not very good.
Existing wiring standards in homes in the UK and many other countries around the world are not really designed with smart lighting in mind. This makes for a more complex and less than ideal user experience.
We have developed a solution to enable a much better user experience in a new build home, which also supports multiple switches connected to a single light fitting and also supports light switch control of normal bulbs and smart bulbs as well.
Our preferred approach is to always just chose the light fitting, type of lighting and style of lighting that we want to use and to then make it smart. This means it will look more stylish, we have many more options and will be much cheaper than using existing 'off the shelf' smart lighting. It also means we get lighting that is fully integrated into our smart home that works with existing switches (where required) and all of the other user interfaces in our contextual smart home, resulting in a much better user experience.
In many cases, low voltage lighting works a lot better than mains powered lighting (220V or 100V ac), especially in external applications and those where it requires protected power (using a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)). Low voltage lighting is much more efficient and is much cheaper to make smart.
Above our dining room table, we want three classic looking filament bulbs to create the right ambience. We choose these mains powered LED filament bulbs for their very warm white colour temperature (2,200K) and good light output. They are very efficient (A+ energy rated), 300 lumen output at 4W power consumption. Eight long, thin LED filaments emit light evenly to prevent glare, striping and flicker. They are also dimmable to <5% and available in E27 and B22 format.
Smart control is achieved using a Fibaro Z-Wave module.
Both Philips and LIFX announced smart filament bulbs in September 2019 but this is kind of missing the point. You are still limited to just a couple of bulb styles/sizes.
Rather than a big, ugly spotlight, we wanted a subtle but very bright light mounted over our white garage door. We chose to use this waterproof caravan awning light. It's 550mm long with and uses 12V dc. It puts out a lot of light but is practically invisible when off. They are also available in black and in a smaller, 250mm long version. This light is also dimmable but we are not using it in this way.
It is controlled via one of our smart home building blocks, a 12V switching module, which is connected to an Arduino processor to add the smartness.
These are covered in more detail here.
When it comes to lighting, the smart home can help prevent light pollution by ensuring lighting is not left on all night just because it is dark and that it comes on only when required.
Photo by Todd Carson. Via darksky.org
Minimising the time lights are on also saves energy. If configured correctly, it can also act as a deterrent to criminals.
