FEATURE Dream smart home
LIGHTING, BLINDS & CURTAINS
Manual control? Pah! It’s time to get smart…
One of the first modern smart home tech products available was Philips Hue smart lighting. And the company’s been adding to its collection of smart lights ever since with a range that includes outdoor lighting, batterypowered lamps, TV light strips and bulbs of every kind. And there are interesting smart lights from Eve and from Nanoleaf, whose normal bulbs are supplemented by really fun shaped lights that can produce dynamic decorative illumination.
The Hue app makes it easy to add your Hue Bridge to your HomeKit network. It’s compatible with other smart home platforms too.
What’s great about smart lights, bulbs and associated devices – such as smart plugs, remote dimmers, switches and increasingly, smart blinds and curtain openers and closers – isn’t just that you can control them remotely, via Siri or even by geolocation so they activate when you come home. It’s that you can combine them into scenes.