Before you consider spending money on expensive smart bulbs, it is important to consider the many types of lighting available and the numerous options this exposes. Adding light bulbs may not always be the best option.
The main natural light source we have is the sun but, the routes its light can take many routes to get into our homes. The surrounding environment can alter the amount of light and its spectrum. At night, the moon can also be also a source of natural light. Natural typically light enters through doors, windows and skylights.
Companies like Velux are well known for their range of skylights.
Companies like Vision Rooflights supply skylights and pyramid rooflights which can also provide added height and volume to a room.
Companies like Solatube supply devices to duct natural daylight into dark spaces such as bathrooms and hallways.
This 'Sunflower' is an innovative way of collecting and reflecting sunlight into a home. It also tracks the sun and cleverly maintains the reflected sunlight in a fixed spot.
Some companies are now looking at home lighting produced by bacterial bioluminescence.
Before you install expensive lighting solutions it is worth considering what barriers exist to enabling natural light to enter you home and what steps can be taken to improve the natural lighting. Moving things like surrounding buildings is usually not an option but, trees are often a significant barrier to natural light and pruning can often be an option.
Dimmable lighting is where a dimmer module is used with standard light bulbs to vary the light output level. There are various types of dimmer modules/switches and not all light bulbs are compatible with them. LED light bulbs have to be designed to work with dimmer modules.
Variable light output is an in-built capability of smart bulbs.
Coloured lighting is worthy of a discussion in its own right.
LEDs in particular are often available in a variety of colours to suit particular applications. They can also used for colour cycling applications, where the LED bulbs cycle through a selection of colours to provide an changing lighting mood.
By intelligent colour selection it is also possible to set a feel or mood in a given space. Blue lighting for example can often imply a cold space and reds or oranges a warm space.
To be completed ...
To be completed ...
Individually addressable LED lighting has become much cheaper and more widely used in recent years. These are strips, tubes and other shapes using many individually addressable LEDs. These means that the required communications protocol can be used to set the colour and brightness of each individual LED. It is most widely used for dynamic lighting effects such as Christmas lights.
Spark is a Kickstarter project to provide a Wi-Fi connected adapter for any bulb.
There are many home automation systems that let you can press a single button to operate many lights at once. The challenge is in knowing how to group the lights behind these buttons. One approach is to configure them based on activities, e.g. party, watch movie, bedtime, etc. and these are called 'scenes'.
Ambient or background lighting basically replaces daylight when the sun has gone down. In most homes it is usually provided by a central pendant light (a hangover from the days of gas lamps) to provide an evenly distributed light source. It is not subtle.
This gives texture, focus and shape to general lighting, adding depth and shade, with shadows in some corners and pools of light in others. It is formed by a mixture of spotlights, down-lighters, uplighters, tracks and table lamps.
This is lighting needed to do a specific job, e.g. reading, working at a computer, cooking, etc. It needs to be focused on the area you're using. We have individual areas of task lighting in our kitchen to cover the worktops, sink, breakfast bar, etc.
Convenience lights are lights that automatically come on when you walk into a room. Typically this behaviour occurs when it is dark outside but, in some rooms (with no windows), this is desirable at any time. These lights are usually driven by PIR sensors or door contact sensors and stay on for a defined time period, following last detected occupancy. Typically this would be used in halls, stairs and in rooms that are used infrequently, such as toilets and bathrooms.
In our current home we have convenience lighting in our kitchen and other rooms in the house. We have made an design decision to have convenience lighting active only when the house thinks we are in.
Security lighting is lighting that comes on automatically to deter criminals. Typically is is linked to passive infra-red (PIR) sensors, beam break sensors or door contact sensors, to detect movement or access to a zone. This may also be considered convenience lighting. It may also be scheduled lighting, to make the home look occupied. This scheduled lighting is much more effective if it is adaptive to things like a twilight sensor and also includes some randomness or learnt behaviour.
This is covered in detail here.
This is covered in detail here.
Dynamic smart lighting is lighting that can also be used to convey useful information. For example, a smart bulb flashing three times to indicate the door bell has been pressed or a light that changes colour to tell you if the shower has reached a nice temperature.
We have developed our own dynamic smart lighting and control "switch" as shown here.
Philips Ambilight is a proprietary technology is a series of LED lights set into the back of Philips TVs or that surround the TV and shine light onto the surrounding wall. Philips also offers 2-sided Ambilight and 4-sided, which is more effective if you wall-mount your TV, because all four sides will effectively disappear, leaving a floating picture surrounded by light on your wall.
There are now many imitators of this technology available and Philips also released a new, cheaper product to enable this on any TV or projector screen.
