What Are The Pros & Cons Of Smart Lights?

Deliberating on whether or not to invest in smart lights for your home? Here are some pros and cons to help inform your decision!

The Pros
There are many reasons why you’ll fall in love with smart lights, but here are some of the main ones!

• They’re Oh, So Convenient!
  Gone are the days of arguing with your partner or children as to whose turn it is to get up and turn the lights off! Simply command and your lights shall listen. Or, just reach over for your smartphone or tablet, and turn the lights off without getting up.
  Need we say more?

• You’ll Save Energy
  Are you sick of family members or yourself leaving the lights on after exiting a room, or even the house? No problem. Integrate your smart lights into your smart home system so that they turn off by themselves when people leave the house or a specific area or room (motion sensors and smart door lock devices can help relay this information to your smart lights when you’ve configured your smart home system well. Not sure how to do this? Speak to our team – we’ll be happy to set up a smart home system for you!).
  Back to our point on energy saving – by ensuring that lights are turned off automatically when they’re not needed anymore, you’ll save a lot on electricity at the end of each month.
  These little cost savings can really add up over the years. As a bonus, you’ll be reducing your carbon footprint as well!

• Smart Lights can Keep your Home More Secure
  Always worried that your home’s sitting in darkness when you’re working late at the office? Use your smart home to turn your outdoor lights on to make your home and neighbourhood more secure. You can even turn on certain indoor lights to make it seem like there are people at home!

The Cons

While there are always some downsides to everything, when it comes to smart lights, these are few and far between, especially if you leave the installation of your smart home system to professionals,
like us!
We know what brands work best and make sure to source quality products for our clients. We can
also recommend the types of smart lights that would work best for your specific requirements – just speak to our team to get started! But, getting back to the few cons, here are some things to be aware of:

• Smart Lights Consume some Power while they are Turned Off
  With normal lights and any normal electrical devices really, it’s quite simple: if the device is switched off then you can assume that it’s not consuming any power. Of course, if it’s on standby, it will consume a tiny amount of power, but that amount is considered negligible.
  With smart lights, you can consider that they’re always in a sort of stand-by mode – they have to be ready to receive any commands from you or the rest of your smart home system, after all. This means
  that they always consume some power, even when you haven’t turned them on.
  However, just like normal devices on standby mode, the amount of power that smart lights consume is not that significant in the grand scheme of things. It can be considered to be a negligible amount in most cases.

• Voice Control Might take Some Effort to Master
  One of the exciting pluses of having a smart light is that you can control it by issuing verbal
  commands to voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, for example. The point to be aware of here is that Alexa, and therefore your smart light, in turn, might not be able to recognize your speech patterns perfectly, right out of the box.
  It takes a little bit of effort to calibrate voice assistants, so make sure to have some patience with them at the very beginning. Soon, your smart lights will be responding perfectly to your every command!