A Smart Home for the Holidays
With our American friends finished celebrating their Thanksgiving, the Holiday season is ramping up on both sides of the 49th parallel. This is the time of year where many people add lighting, both inside and out, to celebrate. Smart lighting will not only allow you better control and design of your lighting, but through automations, you can save on your energy bills! So, let’s talk about how you can retrofit your existing Christmas and Holiday lighting, as well as what products are available that are smart home native.
Outdoor Lighting
Most of us have outdoor lights that we’ve used for years. If you’ve bought outdoor holiday lighting in the last 10 years, chances are it’s no longer the incadescent type, where if one bulb was out you had to test every light in the string: a time-consuming and not-missed early winter tradition I recall from my chldhood helping my dad put up the Christmas lights. Instead, we are almost all utlizing the low energy consumption and low hear generating LED light strings: super reliable, come in many different colour options, and will last for tens of thousands of hours.
Most installations of outdoor lights usually terminate at one or two outlets. This creates the perfect opportunity to automate the lighting through outdoor rated smart plugs. One of my favourites, which is also one of the most cost effective options, is the Meross Outdoor Smart Plug. I love this one because each of the outlets can be individually controlled, and because it works with all the big three smart home platforms (Apple, Google and Amazon). If you are deep in the Lutron Caseta or Philips Hue ecosystem of smart lighting, you’re in luck! Both companies offer an outdoor plug or outdoor lighting options (see links below), with Philips Hue offering a variety of smart outdoor lighting that you can tune for the holidays.
Indoor Lighting
Regardless of what indoor lighting system(s) you use, you can integrate almost any light string or animatronic device using smart plugs. One of the most cost effective options are those from Meross, who often have their 4-pack smart plug minis on sale on Amazon. If space is an issue their Smart Plug, which gives you two individually controllable outlets in one single plug space. Your Christmas tree lights, fireplace lights, Christmas village figures, the Polar Express Train… anything that is plugged into the wall can be plugged into a smart outlet and then incorprated into scenes and automations in your smart home. I’m also a big fan of the Thread-enabled Eve Energy, which not only acts as a Thread border router, but also will give you energy consumption and useage statistics that most of the less expensive smart plugs lack.
If you’ve invested in colour smart bulbs for your smart home, it’s easy to change the colour of the bulbs to match your holiday themes, with some of the best smart bulbs, like my favourite Thread-enabled smart bulbs and light strips from Nanoleaf (their Essentials and Shapes line).
However, if you want to really make an impact, look no further than Twinkly. I’m a massive fan of the Generation 2 GRGB+W lights for my Christmas tree and fireplace (images above). You can even get a completely pre-lit artifical tree! They also make outdoor lights, and all their products are now Homekit compatible, in addition to Google and Amazon. With individually addressable LEDs, and 6 million colours, combined with custom animations and lighting effects, these lights can do it all. Snowflakes falling, Santa’s sleigh across your fireplace, and with the Twinkly Music, you can time your lighting effects to your music.
There are a lot of ways to integrate your holiday traditions into your smart home, saving you money on energy costs, adding value by giving you more colour and lighting controls, and allowing automations to wow your family and friends. Make a plan of what you want to incorporate and look for sales on Black Friday, pre-holiday sales and Boxing week (for next year’s decorations!). If you can dream it, it’s possible. If you don’t know how, drop us a line and let Synapse Smart Homes make it a reality for you!
*affiliate links may generate a commission for the author at no additional cost to you
