The New Way To Brighten Your Outdoor Spaces December 29, 2016 00:00

During the daylight hours in the great outdoors, there's no better light than natural sunlight. But what happens when day turns to night and you're not ready to head indoors?

The efficiency, customization, and versatility of smart lighting ensures your family BBQ and your Labor Day house party aren't cut short by the setting sun. 

You won’t find a more cost-effective bulb out there

Part of the reason smart lighting has become such a viable lighting solution for so many people today is that these bulbs are so cheap to keep lit.

Now credit where credit is due, the majority of your energy savings with smart lighting come from the fact that they are 100% LED bulbs. For those of you out there who may have heard of LEDs but don’t really know what they are, let’s take a minute to explain what makes these bulbs so special.

A traditional incandescent bulb works by heating up a filament so much that the material eventually gives off light. Unfortunately, 90% of the energy to do create this light is given off as heat. Fluorescent bulbs used an electric current to charge mercury gas particles, giving off ultraviolet light which is then transformed into light by the phosphor coating inside the bulb.

And while this is a far more efficient lighting choice than incandescent bulbs, they still don’t compare to LEDs. CFLs (or compact fluorescent lamps), for instance, are about 75% more efficient than incandescent bulbs and have a lifetime of about 6,000 to 15,000 hours. LEDs, on the other hand, are 75-80% more efficient and can have a lifetime of 25,000 hours. And they use up less electricity per hour too! Pretty impressive!

What all this adds up to for you is a cheaper, longer lasting bulb. And when you have lights that you’ll be leaving on for an extended period of time (like outdoor lights!), making sure you save as much money as possible per bulb can really have a significant impact on your bank account.

Adjust brightness levels on demand to suit any occasion

While the savings you’ll be racking up with smart lighting is the main reason to switch your outdoor lighting over to smart bulbs, there are definitely more benefits involved than just a fatter wallet. And one of those is the ability to change your outdoor lighting brightness on a whim.

You may have noticed that most of the switches in your home with dimmer switches connect to indoor lights alone. The reason for that is many outdoor light bulbs aren’t actually dimmable which can lead to some pretty annoying situations down the line.

If, for instance, you are hosting an intimate barbecue for a few close friends, you probably won’t want to bathe the event in the near-daytime lighting levels of most outdoor floodlights. But you also want to keep the area brightly lit when you aren’t entertaining to ward off burglars and pests.

The solution? Use the dimming feature of your smart lighting to adjust the lighting to suit the occasion. And while these bulbs won’t offer as much lighting power as most safety lights, many smart bulbs offer around 550lms of brightness which might be just enough for your home!

Use smart bulbs to add more customizability to your outdoor lighting

No discussion of the benefits of smart lighting would be complete without touching on one of the most exciting features of most high-end smart bulbs: the ability to change colors!

All it takes is selecting one of your bulbs through the convenient app and then pointing out the desired color. That’s it!

One of the benefits of this particular feature is that if you have smart bulbs for your outdoor lighting, all you need to do to decorate for any holiday is switch up the colors: red and green for Christmas, orange and dark green or purple for Halloween, even the colors of your favorite sports team during the playoffs.

But don’t discount the color feature just because it isn’t a special occasion. With smart lighting, you also have control over the more traditional lighting color choices at any time. That means the entire color temperature range is at your disposal, giving you access to warm white, cool white, daylight, and everything in between whenever you’d like!

With this enhanced customizability, you can pick out the perfect lighting arrangement so that your home looks exactly the way you want. Not a lot of light bulbs can offer that!

Don’t forget the other features!

Efficiency, brightness, and color aside, smart lighting has a lot more to offer when it comes to outdoor lighting.

The scheduling feature, for instance, lets you set any bulb you choose to its own lighting schedule. So, if you would like to have your front door light turn on at 5:37pm every night you can arrange for that right from your smart device, no external timer required!

Smart lighting owners also have the ability to control multiple bulbs at once by putting your bulbs into groups. This gives you the option of turning off an entire set of bulbs with one push of a button rather than turning off each individually. For you homeowners out there that have a lot of outdoor lighting, just imagine being able to turn them all on at once rather than flip ten different switches.

Let us know what you think!