These Are My 6 Favorite Creative Automations for Smart Home Lighting

Smart lights make an incredible addition to any home, but it can be difficult to fully take advantage of their features. Here are some of my favorite uses for smart lighting and how you can implement them in your home.

1 Lighting Rooms With Smart Motion Sensors

Light bulbs don’t use a lot of electricity, but turning them off when you’re not in a room is a great way to lower your overall energy use (when paired with other energy-saving efforts around the home).

Smart motion sensors make saving electricity easier, since you can configure your lights to power on when you’re in a room and turn off after a certain amount of time has passed with no motion detected.

You can create this automation using a compatible smart light and smart motion sensor. Using Roku smart bulbs and Roku home cameras, I created an automation in the Roku Home app that turns on the light in a room when the camera detects a person.

Turning off the light is somewhat harder and what will work best depends on what your app allows you to do. Since the Roku Home app didn’t allow me to add a timer to the rule itself, I added a separate rule that makes the light turn off after a delay.

2 Improving Home Alarms With Smart Light Triggers

You’re not alone if you’ve ever worried about sleeping through your fire or burglar alarms. If you configure your smart lights to turn on when an alarm sounds, you can make it less likely that you’ll sleep through something dangerous.

Many smart devices are capable of detecting that an alarm has gone off — you might have smart alarms or your smart cameras might be able to recognize the noise. Since my Roku cameras are capable of detecting alarm noises, I decided to create the automation using them.

Setting your lights to turn on when an alarm goes off in the Roku Home app is as simple as creating a new rule, setting the trigger to when your camera detects an alarm, and adding an action for each of your lights.

Since your cameras aren’t waiting to be triggered by a specific alarm, it will turn on when any home alarm goes off. If your home alarms don’t support smart integrations, this method is a great way to improve your home security without breaking the bank.

3 Syncing Lighting With TV and Music

Light shows are majestic and complex, but they might seem like something that would be impossible to enjoy in the comfort of your home. Luckily, some smart lights allow you to enjoy incredible light shows with anything you watch or listen to through syncing.

If you want to sync your lights with your TV or music, you’ll need smart lights that support syncing. Phillips Hue smart lights have particularly good syncing support, but some other smart lights support the feature as well.

If you’re syncing Phillips Hue lights, you’ll need to start by opening the Entertainment Areas tab in the Hue Sync app. Afterwards, you can select what you want to sync (such as your TV or Spotify account) and follow the instructions in the app to set it up.

4 Pairing Notifications With Smart Lighting Alerts

If you’re worried about missing something exciting, like your favorite Twitch stream or a text from your partner, it might thrill you to learn that smart lights can notify you when you receive important notifications.

The setup process will vary depending on what smart lights you’re using and what notifications you want to sync your smart lights with. IFTTT widgets exist for plenty of the wants you might have, and I found that the Hue SMS notification widget worked perfectly for my needs.

Unfortunately, IFTTT widgets don’t work with all smart devices. For example, I couldn’t find any useful widgets for my Roku devices. If you own a supported brand, however, IFTTT widgets offer an impressive step above the basic automations you get with a manufacturer app.

5 Staying on Schedule With Calendar Integration

If you want to ensure that holidays are festive, weekend parties or dinners are well-lit, and that your home lighting is comfortable throughout the rest of the year; you might find that calendar integration saves you from an enormous mental load.

If you own a supported smart bulb, you can integrate your smart lights directly with your calendar using an IFTTT widget. Otherwise, you’ll need to check whether your smart light manufacturer supports date-based automations.

The power of the IFTTT Google Calendar integration can’t be understated, however. Beyond changing your smart lighting depending on the day of the month, you can also set automations for specific days (like voting days) or change your lighting based on your Google Calendar status.

You can even improve your punctuality with calendar integration. If you set your lights to change to a different color before an important doctor’s appointment or meeting, there’s no need to worry about remembering — your smart light will do the work for you.

6 Complementing the Weather With Light Syncing

It’s easy to ignore the moody grey light of a storm or the vibrancy of a sunny day when you’re indoors, but there’s something wonderful about romanticizing the weather. By syncing your lights, you can make sure the mood always matches the weather.

Depending on your smart home setup, you have a few options. There’s a weather-based IFTTT widget for Phillips Hue devices, as well as the aptly-named Thunderstorm for Hue app.

You may also be able to sync your smart lights to other telltale signs of specific weather, such as thermometer readings (where you can dim and warm the lights on irregularly cool days) or the precipitation that your smart outdoor camera detects.

Beyond these ideas, there are a lot of excellent possibilities just within the widgets on IFTTT, and other brands of smart lights might have features that Roku and Phillips lack. The only limit to what you can do is your imagination.