Philips Hue: a Great Start to a Smarter, Connected Home

Smart stuff has been all over the news lately. Smartglasses, smartphones, smartwatches. One of the newer smart devices is the smart home. For most people, they like the idea of living in a connected and ultimately more efficient home but have a tough time picking a place to start. Do you start with replacing whole devices such as a smart air conditioner or do you start small with just some smart bulbs? If you’re interested in starting small, I’ve got a great way to start making your house smarter. I was able to try out the Philips Hue starter kit for a few days and man, I felt smarter. And my house was more efficient too so everybody wins!

Setup

When I first discovered smart bulbs, I thought that there had to be some sort of catch with the set up. It couldn’t be so easy; obviously, some sort of witchcraft or wizardry was afoot. Apparently, it is wizardry because setting up the system took about 2 minutes. I downloaded the Philips Hue app, plugged the hub into my router, and screwed one of the smart bulbs into a lamp. Done. I was instantly able to play around with all of the pretty colors from my smartphone. Everything should be controllable by smartphone because it’s fun. Anyways, it could be incredibly bright; it felt as though I would have permanent retinal scarring if I started too long.

The vast array of colors made the options seem endless. However, if the possibilities seemed too endless, there were plenty of preset options that you could rely on. It made for a very seamless adjustment to a type of technology that I had never used before.

Usage

Once set up and playing with all the colors, I had to get down to business. The simple pleasure of being able to turn off the lights in the house from anywhere in the house or even right outside turned out to be much more practical than I had originally imagined. Because light switches are so prevalent, most people never stop to think about how annoying it is in certain situations to be forced to navigate to the one location to perform such a simple action. The added control is revolutionary. No longer do I need to walk across the kitchen to the light switch before I went upstairs. I can just go upstairs and sit down next to my smartphone and turn off the lights. It’s small, subtle even, but extremely useful.

If I’ve convinced you that smart bulbs are worth your time and effort, go check out Philips Hue  right now, you won’t be sorry!