Smart lights for the home, office, and living room in 2022: the best options
With a few taps on your smartphone, you can transform your house into a warm and welcoming environment. You don't have to get up from the couch to adjust the brightness, switch it on or off, or even alter the colour of the light with the best smart light.
A wide variety of designs are available for the best smart lights. Smart light bulbs, which just replace your existing incandescent bulbs, are the most cost-effective and easiest to install option. If you're looking for a smart light that can illuminate your home in any way you can think of, you'll find it in the form of ceiling and floor lamps, light strips, tubes, and even light panels that can be affixed to your walls.
It's possible to manage your smart lighting with your voice using one of the most popular smart speakers or displays. Additionally, they can work with other smart home devices, such as thermostats and smart plugs and switches, to automate your house, such as illuminating when the temperature rises a few degrees and the appliances connected to smart plugs and switches come on.
When it comes to saving energy, smart lights can also be a useful tool (and money). It is common for smart lights to be LED models, which use less power than incandescent bulbs. The best part is that while some smart light bulbs utilise Bluetooth and can only be turned on when you're close by, many other smart lighting solutions use Wi-Fi and can be turned on and off from anywhere you have Internet access. To avoid wasting energy, you may now turn off the lights from your phone rather of having to wait until you arrive home to do so.
2022's smartest lightbulb
1. Philips Hue Color Ambiance 1
If you're looking for a smart lighting system, Philips Hue is without a doubt one of the best options out there. The app is simple to use, and the lights are the most natural-looking of any smart lighting we've tried.
Additionally, there are a broad variety of smart lighting options, from colour bulbs (which come in 16 million shades), to white bulbs (solid and ambient), to side and ceiling lamps, as well as Philips Hue light strips. Using Alexa, Google Assistant, or HomeKit, the smart lights worked flawlessly.
But even though Hue bulbs have Bluetooth built-in so you don't need a hub to set them up, the Hue Bridge ensures that you can access all of the useful features, such as geofences and the ability to customise when lights come on; for example, at a specific time or when something happens, such as sunset and sunrise.
2. The LIFX A19
LIFX, like Philips Hue, offers a wide variety of smart light alternatives, including colour and white bulbs, as well as lightstrips, LIFX Beam - the brand's take on smart light wall art, and LIFX Clean - a smart light that can also destroy bacteria. Best home security cameras have an outside lamp that improves night vision.
Instead of requiring a central hub, LIFX smart bulbs connect directly to your home's Wi-Fi, unlike Philips Hue. We were astounded by the vivid colours the bulbs produced, despite the fact that they were both simple to install and simple to operate. The bulbs, like Philips Hue, are pricey when compared to traditional incandescent lights.
Even if you have a smart home with HomeKit or Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, these devices will work. Because of their flat tops, the bulbs don't appear to be natural, and they're also quite heavy.
3. Nanoleaf Shapes
In the Nanoleaf Shapes, lighting is reimagined from the bottom up. Your wall (or ceiling, or both) can take on a dynamic shape thanks to the use of a selection of hexagonal and triangular panels.
In addition, the panels may either glow in a single hue or change colour at varying speeds to produce a distinctive lighting effect in your home, depending on your preference. The panels may also be programmed to respond to touch or even music being played in the area, making you the star of your very own music video.
Initially, the set includes nine panels of the same shape, but you can add additional and mix and match the different shapes to your heart's content. When not illuminated, these plastic hexagonal panels don't look very appealing, so if you like a more refined design, we recommend Nanoleaf Elements in a wood-like veneer version of the hexagonal panels. Once they've been installed, they're also difficult to remove.
Hexagon and triangle sounds aren't your cup of tea? Nanoleaf Canvas is a light panel with a square shape, but regrettably, Nanoleaf Shapes cannot be coupled with it.
4. Nanoleaf Essentials
The Nanoleaf Shapes are undeniable in their ability to produce novel lighting effects, but they are an expensive buy and will not work with conventional side lamps. In case you're worried about the price, Nanoleaf has the Essentials line of smart lighting at a lower cost. Both the Nanoleaf Essentials lightstrip and the rhombicosidodecahedron-shaped smart light bulb are viable options, but only one will appeal to everyone.
Circadian Lighting, a feature that varies the colour temperature throughout the day to resemble natural light, is also included in these lamps.
A smart home technology called Thread, which is more stable than Wi-Fi and eliminates sluggish connections, is supported by Nanoleaf Essentials smart lights. Only HomeKit and Google Assistant are supported, so if you want to utilise Alexa to operate your smart home, you should steer clear of these plugins.
5. TP-Link Kasa Filament Smart Bulb (KL50)
Even while TP-Link is best recognised for its high-quality networking gear like its best wireless routers and its best powerline adapters, the company also makes an affordable line of smart home gadgets like its best smart bulbs.
There are a few brands that provide smart filament-style bulbs (like the one we tested here) that can create a vintage-style aesthetic while still preserving modern smart home functionality.
The TP-Link Kasa Filament Smart Bulb is straightforward to set up and easy to operate, however it does not support HomeKit or Amazon Alexa.