Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
My husband and I were in the process of moving homes, and as part of the delightful mess, we’ve had to uninstall every smart home product we’d set up in our old rental to move it to our new place. A Roborock vacuum, a connected air quality monitor, a smart air purifier, a Nest Audio, a Google TV Streamer, and a bunch of cool, nerdy, and smart gadgets that we’d gotten so used to. As everything went into packing boxes, waiting to be moved, unpacked, and re-installed, and we had to live without our smart home for a few days, we realized the intrinsic value of each item.
And the one element we both immediately missed was my Hue smart light setup. And by “immediately,” I literally mean within minutes of removing the lights. Three years we’d spent with our lights, we relied on them through automations and scenes, and we loved how bright and convenient they were in our ground-floor, east-exposed, small Parisian suburb apartment. Suddenly, we were back to the dreary bulbs our landlord had left behind, and we had to use wall switches, like common folks, to turn on and off the light. How very archaic!
It wasn't just my nerdy smart home obsession; my husband also missed the Hue lights within minutes of uninstalling them.
To be honest, I kind of expected myself to miss our setup, but the fact that my husband was lamenting the downgrade just as much made my feelings more valid. I wasn’t just missing them because I’m nerdy and I like my smart home; I was missing them because they genuinely provided extra value in our daily lives.
Frankly, everything I talk about next could be true of any smart light, but we had bought some Hue lights a long time ago and stuck with the ecosystem because it's so reliable, it's compatible with everything, and it works even when my smart home is offline.
Smart lights aren’t just convenient; they’re invaluable in my daily life
When I mention smart lights to people, they think I’m talking about turning my living room into a blue and orange gamer’s den, about running a constant party mode, or about asking Google Assistant to turn on or off the lights. The truth is that most of my Hue lights are just white balance ones (i.e. they only switch between different white temperatures, they don’t do RGB colors). And while the voice command part is true, the lights’ convenience stretches far beyond just voice or phone controls. Let me explain.
Motion sensors and automated hallway/entryway lights
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
My favorite Hue configuration revolves around setting up a motion sensor in the hallway/entryway of our small apartment. Each time we come home, the lights turn on the moment we open the door, even if our hands are full. Then, they turn off five minutes after no motion has been detected. Each time I go from the living room to the kitchen or bedroom (or vice versa), the lights come on automatically, but only if it’s not daytime, then turn off five minutes later. At night, they dim to a 5% very warm white (almost orange) so as not to jar us if we need to use the bathroom.
A motion sensor and some smart schedules meant that I never had to think about turning on/off the lights in an area I often just pass by, not stay in.
For three years, I haven’t touched the light switch in my hallway because I never needed to. It’s the most practical thing ever. And I love that I don’t have to think about turning on/off the lights in an area where I’m just quickly passing. I don’t mind pressing the switch for a room I’ll be in for hours, but a hallway? Please, no, and thank you.
After uninstalling these, we spent a couple of days grumbling while the lights and motion sensor sat in a box. Turning on and off the hallway light manually was a chore we’d long forgotten in our first-world luxury lifestyle, and the one time I had to use the bathroom at night, I heard my husband grumble and tell me to shut it down. Never again.
Natural light scenes throughout the day
Hue has implemented a “natural light” scene in the app, but I have been using the time-based light formula in Hue Labs because it gives me more control and remains active even if I manually switch scenes and forget to switch back. Regardless of what you use, though, the natural light idea is the same: It gives you bright, slightly cooler light during the day, then starts dimming and warming up in the evening until it turns to a very faint nightlight at night.
A naturally-changing light that follows the hours of the day was perfect for my office-in-the-living-room situation.
We’d been using this in our living room — which was also our office — and trusting it to take us through the day, from a bright work mode to a chill evening mode. And it was just perfect for our routine… until we packed the lights away and reinstalled our landlord’s single-temperature, single-brightness lights. “Is this the brightest these go?” my husband asked as we stared at the poor Ikea bulb and shrugged. I nodded. “And they won’t dim at 8 PM, either, right?” I shrugged.
Smart, gentle wake-up with light
My husband will sleep anywhere, anyway, in any light condition. Me, however, I’m a creature of light: you take it away, I doze off; you turn it on, I wake up. I usually prefer using a light as my alarm because I know I’ll wake up to it (and I’ll do it less groggily) instead of using annoying and jarring alarm ringtones.
I’d set up a Personal wake-up formula in Hue Labs to help with that. Every morning during working days, it fades in the bedroom lights to 70% over the course of 15 minutes, slowly and gently waking me up. I loved how well this worked and got so used to it, especially during the super late Parisian winter mornings. When we took away the Hue lights from our bedroom, I went back to using alarms and boy, did I hate every second of it!
I prefer to wake up with light, not alarms, and Hue helped me do that.
That’s not to mention the dim nighttime scene I’d gotten used to before bed or the fact that, for some dumb reason, our landlord had connected the main bedroom light and the wall plugs near the bed to the same switch. We couldn’t charge our phones while sleeping because that would require the light to stay on. For three years, we hadn’t had that problem because we could always turn off the Hue light separately while keeping the switch on. I think I heard my husband huff, “This is so dumb,” at least three times every evening before we finalized our move.
With all that said, you can imagine that one of the first things we unpacked after moving to our new place was the Hue box. And we both sighed in relief when everything went back to our old routine.
So yes, you might look at smart lights and think they’re a gimmick, but for us, they’ve become essential in our daily lives, specifically the ability to control their brightness and color temperature at various times or in various settings. I wouldn’t go back to a regular bulb — ever. And neither would my husband. Spouse approval: 100/10.
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