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. 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.