Three Unique Uses for Smart Lights

Do you want to get more out of your smart lights? You’re enjoying the energy-savings. Perhaps you already have automation set up to turn them on and off at certain times. Maybe you have schedules making it so that the lights are different tones and levels of brightness at different times of the day. There are countless things you can do to take full advantage of your smart light’s features. Here are three unique uses for smart lights you may not have thought of before.

1. Enhance Your Doorbell

Sometimes, it’s nice to take a break from technology. With everything connected to your phone, it can be easy to feel like you need to have it with you all the time.

If you’re playing with your kids, you might want to cut ties with technology so they can have your full attention. You ordered dinner through Doordash, but you know from experience that you can’t hear the doorbell from the basement playroom. Without your phone, you won’t get a notification from your Ring Video Doorbell, either. Since you have smart lights, you can set up a way of getting notified without being interrupted by all the other notifications that come in before dinner arrives. Before playtime, create a rule for the lights in the playroom that will let them act as a secondary doorbell. You could have them blink blue three times or something similar when the doorbell rings. This will let you know dinner has arrived without cellphone interruptions.

Perhaps you want an easier way of notifying your teen that their friends have arrived for their weekly game night. You could text your teen or go down to their room to inform them in person, or you could save yourself needing to do either by setting the smart lights in their room to indicate when the doorbell rings. They might not want their lights acting as a doorbell every other day of the week. You can set the rule to only take effect on that day within the timeframe their friends usually arrive during.

You could also use this to have the lights on the patio flash to tell you when guests have arrived for the barbecue you’ve been outside cooking and other similar scenarios.

2. Budget Friendship Lamp

Over the last few years, much of society has come to understand the importance of connection in a new way after all the time we’ve been isolated and otherwise apart. Whether you have a friend who moved to the other side of the state, family in a different part of the country, or a long-distance relationship with someone on a different continent, you want to have ways of staying connected to the people you love. Perhaps you send texts, have phone and video calls, send emails, and see what they’ve been doing through social media. In addition to these more conventional means, friendship lamps have been gaining popularity.

The concept is to have two connected lamps. When one user touches their lamp, the second lamp will light up wherever it is in the world, so long as it has power and a Wi-Fi connection. This serves as a simple way of letting someone know you are thinking of them. This can be cute and sentimental, but it’s also expensive. The lamps are around $100 apiece, $200 for a set.

You could set up friendship lamps using smart lights as a more affordable alternative that can be just as meaningful. Start by getting lamps, either a matching set or by finding lamps for each other. Then, put color changing smart lights in them. Using the app’s sharing settings, share your bulbs with each other. From there, you can create different scenes to indicate specific messages. Pink could mean “thinking of you.” Blue could mean “I miss you.” Yellow could mean “I hope you have a great day.” When you want to activate your friend’s lamp, go into the app and tap the scene named after the message you want to share.

You could also set timers for the lights to turn themselves off after a certain amount of time. Then, you won’t accidentally leave your friend’s light on all day if they aren’t home to turn it off on their own after they’ve finished enjoying your message.

3. Red Alert

Alarms are designed to scare off intruders. You can take it up to the next level with your smart lights. In movies, when there’s an emergency, a spaceship or base will often go to red alert. The alarms and flashing red lights are a nice visual effect for cinematic purposes. In the real world, that’s bound to scare more than a few people. By programming your smart lights to flash red when the alarm goes off, you can create your own personal red alert and send intruders running.

What other unique uses for smart lights have you found? Let us know in the comments.