PHILIPS HUE SMART LIGHTS SETUP! | Smart Home Tour Ep 02

rootF IMG 60b9d387c7c00

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Woodworking Plans Banner

I am too excited about this Wow! Well hey y'all it's Ashley Renne and welcome back to my sustainable travel lifestyle and
smart tech youtube channel where i teach you how to live an adventurously green
life. Right now you're watching my smart home series. I regularly post videos
about my Tesla and my smart home technology setup so if you're into those
kinds of thing make sure you subscribe to my channel so you can keep up with all
of my smart tech adventures. Now on the last episode of my smart home series I
talked about my smart home security setup but on this episode I want to get
into lighting so let's dive right into it. Now I chose to light my home up with
Philips hue light bulbs as well as these smart wireless dimmer switches. Now these are not just ordinary light bulbs, they change colors you guys! They can also
sync with music, they can sync with your video games and your movies and you can also schedule them to come on whenever you want.

That's pretty cool and all with
the touch of a button or even with voice commands so I want to get into exactly
why I love my lighting setup so much so let's go over some of my favorite
features. So first of all I love that you can
create a mood for every single room in your house. I've installed these light bulbs pretty much everywhere.

In my kitchen, my living room,
my family room, bedroom, bathroom, upstairs entertainment area and once we finish
our basement we're gonna have the lights all downstairs in the basement as well.
As you can imagine these lights can really be great for parties because they
literally colorfully transform your entire house with the touch of a button.
They have over 16 million colors to choose from and you can control what
lights you want to see where so if you want all of the lights to be the same
color then you can do that. Maybe I want my kitchen lights to be blue as well as
my family room or maybe I want my family room to be red and my kitchen lights to
be blue or in this instance I really want you to be able to see me so I'm
gonna turn this back to white. So they have 60 million different colors and
then also all different shades of white to choose from and as you can imagine
this would be a really great party trick your friends will love it it's great for
entertaining. Another cool thing about this app is
they come with their own light recipes or you can create presets of your
own.

For your daily routine you can choose from four different white light
presets that they have designed for relaxing, reading, concentrating or
energizing. For example this is the relax, this is for reading, this is for
concentrating and this is for energizing. They also have some colorful presets
like for example this is savanna sunset which is a nice fiery orange, this is
tropical Twilight which is a nice purple color. Another cool thing about Phillips
Hue lights, you don't even have to manually turn them on and off you can actually
schedule them to come on and off whenever you want them to.

I remember back in the
day when I had to plug in timers to my lamps in order to make this happen
not anymore y'all. You can create your own sleep routine by setting your lights
to slowly turn on in the morning to gently wake you up and vice versa you
can have them slowly turn off in the evening time. You can also set your
lights to automatically turn on and off whenever you're leaving or entering your
home. Another really useful feature which is really good for energy savings is you
can configure your lights to follow the timing of the sunset and the Sun Rise
and a really handy thing to do is when you're on vacation you can randomize the
way your lights come on so that way nobody knows if you're home or not.

Okay so let's talk about a feature that
I just think is beyond dope. You can sync your lights with your
music, your movies and your video games Like can you imagine having a party
and you're playing music and the lights are just turning off and on to the beat
it's like you're in a lounge or some kind of nightclub. It's a super cool
effect that I really really love and I cannot wait to test out on my next party
that I have. Now in order to sync your lights you need to download the Hue Sync
to your desktop and pair it with your Hue bridge just like you did with your
Hue app and I'll get into how to do all that later on in the video. Once that's
done the lights will sync with what's playing on your computer.

pexels photo 106399

I just tested
this out with some Beyonce tracks and I can confirm it creates a very cool vibe.
Now fYI I did have to do some troubleshooting when I first tried this
out because it didn't work right away so if you have a Mac and you find that you
download Hue sync and it's not working try this because this is what works for
me. I went into my system preferences security, and privacy selected the
privacy table and I made sure the hue sync was checked under accessibility.
That fixed the problem The other thing I love about the Philips
you lighting is all the different ways I can control it so for example as you
guys know I can control it straight from my app, I can control it straight from my
smart wireless dimmer.

Which is pretty cool. I can control it from the
hue sync which you download the desktop and I can also use voice commands so if
you have a larger ecosystem like Google assistant or Alexa you can literally use
your voice to control your lighting for example a lot of times I'll tell Google
to turn the lights off I can even tell Google to turn it down to a certain
percentage so for example I can tell Google to dim the light down to 10% and
it'll do that. I love that there are just so many different ways that I can
control my entire light setup. So we talked about all the features now let's
talk about where you should get started and also how you go about installing
these bad boys.

So first and foremost very important if you're just starting
out with this you're gonna want to order the Philips hue starter kit because
that's gonna come with a hue bridge which is very important as well as four
different light bulbs to get you started Now the Hue Bridge is really important if
you want this whole party to work because it is the brains of the system,
it's what communicates between of the light and your smart apps that you're
using to control the lights. Now of course we needed way more than four
bulbs so we bought the starter kit plus a ton of individual bulbs to finish
setting up our entire house. Now this takes very little time to
install especially if you use a light bulb changer for those hard to reach
areas like my ceilings and it really really reduced the time you know as
opposed to say using a ladder to have to do this. Don't do it the slow way get a
light bulb changer. I have this 11 foot pole light bulb changer kit and it is
amazing all you have to do is attach the basket which is the part that grabs the
light bulb to the pole, you place the bulb, large side down, into the basket,
you extend the pole and then you screw in the light bulb and it works in the
reverse you can also use it to unscrew a light bulb and pull it out.

So simple
make sure you do it the easy way and not the hard way guys. The wireless dimmer
switch is even easier because all you gotta do is stick these wherever you
want and you don't have to do any drilling, there's no mess like you
literally just stick it onto your wall and you're done. Now once you have
everything installed now it's time to actually connect your Philips hue light
bulbs and your smart wireless dimmer switches to the Philips hue app which is
available for both iOS and Android you do this with the hue bridge like I said
earlier the hue bridge is what connects everything together. You simply plug it
in and then connect it to your router once you open the app and pair it with
your bridge you can begin using the phone to control your Philips hue
lighting set up. Y'all I cannot emphasize enough just how much I love my philips
hue lighting setup. It's one of the first smart home tech products that we got
when we first moved in and I just found it to be incredibly useful I use it
literally every single day and not only that it adds a lot of spice to
situations that would otherwise be pretty ordinary.

So that's it for my
smart tech video for today make sure you give this video a thumbs up and
subscribe for more of my smart tech adventures. I'm gonna have another one next week and just to give you a hint it might make
you hungry. Hmm what could this be? Until next week you guys keep on living and adventurously green life..

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

You May Also Like

About the Author: tech