Smart Lights (general) Review

Just reviewed my August Smart Lock which turned into more of a general review on smart locks focused around August's offerings. So I figured I would do one on smart lights as well.

Smart lights have the same problem any smart product has. They do a piss poor job of explaining what real world problems they solve.

Smart lights, in my opinion, can do a few things:

1. It seems cool.
2. Save money.
3. Theft deterrent.
4. Save energy.

I feel like #1 is the primary reason to get more than a handful of lights. But, let's look at the other 2 to see why I feel this way. Your thoughts may differ.

#2 was saving money. Smart lights can accomplish this in a number of ways. They are almost always dimmable, and don't require a dimmer switch. This can mean less energy. They are LED, which if you're replacing tungsten filament or CFL bulbs you'll get savings that way. They can be scheduled or driven by motion sensors to reduce the odds of leaving them on absurdly long. But... they are expensive. A19 bulbs continue to get more competitive in price, but other formats are still ludicrously expensive. So, whether or not they can save you money depends on a lot of factors.

Put simply, I think it would be hard to save a lot of money compared to other LED solutions. Even for A19 bulbs, which are the cheapest smart bulbs. You can still get non-smart LEDs cheaper. And then you're only saving money if they are actually on less or you're dimming them and those things happen enough that you save more than the extra you spent over the life of the bulbs because they don't last forever. And they aren't really rated to last longer than non-smart LED bulbs.

With other light connectors the story is worse. GU10 bulbs, at the cheapest cost about $25CAD each in a 2 pack and that is cheapest per light I've seen. That is expensive for a single bulb. Over a long enough period of time it might make sense to change your lighting to something using A19's instead if you want smart lighting. My basement is a prime example, it uses GU10s for pot lighting. The main area has 10 bulbs. $250 dollars in bulbs! And that is just the MAIN area.

But that isn't where the problem ends. In commonly used areas, light switches are still more convenient than an app or voice commands. To make sure you're not "breaking" your smart solution by having these things controlled by analog switches, you ideally want to replace your existing switches with wireless smart switches. Which ramps the costs up further. ROI is really hard for me to justify in most scenarios.

That being said... I do see some places where it makes sense. Just, maybe not the whole house. Front porch and living room for instance.

I like my front porch light to be on at night and off during the day. But, I don't normally think about those lights. So, they'd either be on all the time or off. Scheduling them or using IFTTT to trigger them on and off at sunset and sunrise would give me the experience I want and ensure that they aren't left on.

For the living room, we spend a lot of time in there, and we regularly use different levels of brightness.

One last place I use it is our stairwell. It turns on at our daughter bed time and then dims shortly thereafter to leave some light for her and us, and the shuts off entirely at a predefined time as well. Again, automating something and leveraging dimming in a way which ensures we don't needlessly waste energy.

And, this segues well into theft deterrent. Scheduled lights also give the appearance of being home when you're not. Some products, like the Hue bulbs I have even allow you to program them to come on or off at random so someone casing the house wouldn't be able to tell they were operating on a predefined schedule.

But, once again, you don't really need the whole house for this. A few key rooms would suffice. In fact, having a light come on in a clearly visible room when no one is in it, would actually have the opposite effect. It could end up basically advertising that the home is on a schedule and that no one is in there. You really want to limit this to rooms which can't easily be seen into, like second level bed rooms, or rooms you regularly keep curtains or blinds closed in, or room where you can see the light from the front or side of the house, but not into the actual rooms. But, lights are something you use regularly and the difference between smart and regular lights for a few rooms is a lot cheaper than other dedicate theft deterrent products or a cheap way to improve upon an existing theft deterrent solution.

The last point I added after arguing ROI is hard if the purpose is money savings. If environmental friendliness is more important, then you might not care about ROI or not care as much. They are linked but not completely. If you save money on your energy bill with smart lights, that is pretty much because you're saving energy and thus the environment.

But you can save energy and still not break even on ROI because smart lights have a limited life and good competition on cost. For instance, if I find regular LED lights for $5 or $15 for a smart bulb, but over the life of the two bulbs the smart bulb would only have saved me $5 more than the regular LED would have, then I saved $5 worth of energy and environmental impact, but still spent $5 more overall. If ROI is my concern I wouldn't buy the smart bulb, but if environmental friendliness is, I might.

The first point is my final to talk about. And that is, if you find it cool to control your lighting with a voice assistant or an app, you probably don't care about price. But, if you're married or share a house, chance are this point on its own will make it a hard sale.

In the long run, I think the average person is best justified using more than one of the above points in combination and then buying only a few bulbs and playing around with location to determine where they actually make sense in your house. I think the light switch problem is really the hardest thing to deal with. Banks of lights controlled by multiple light switches are even worse. Needing to buy 2 smart switches to control one light feels like a kick in the nuts. And worse, if you want to skip smart lights and go with just smart switches, wired smart switches are comparatively quite expensive and depending on the solution may require rewiring the whole home. 

However, if none of those reasons are enough for you, smart lights may not make sense for you.