If you want to smarten up your home lighting but would rather not do the setting up yourself, then you’re in luck. Vivint Security has added smart lighting to their smart home retinue.
You can purchase a Smart Lighting Bundle with adjustable smart A19 and BR30 flood bulbs as well as 4-inch LED downlights. The lights have a wide range of tones and brightness adjustments available but no RGB capabilities (yet, it’s something they’re looking into for future releases). Vivint Smart Lighting uses a Zigbee network that doesn’t rely on your wireless network or clog up local network traffic and works with any Zigbee lights you might already own.
Setup is simple…for you at least. A Vivint tech has to come and install the bulbs. This involves connecting a lighting bridge to your home network, pairing the bulbs to the bridge, and creating groups for the paired bulbs so that you can easily control them all at once or singly from your Vivint security hub or app.
I’m hoping that future iterations of the product will open up installation to consumers. While I appreciated not having to do the pairing and setup myself, I balk a bit at the idea of having to schedule a service visit to screw in a lightbulb and add it to my network.
The lights function beautifully and, as one might expect from a security company’s product, comes with an “Away Mode,” turning lights on and off randomly in the groups you designate during certain hours of the day. You can also integrate your smart lighting into your other security scenes, having smart bulbs activate when alarms are triggered or people are detected by one of your system’s cameras.
As much as I distrust the “everything AI” movement, this is one of those spots where machine learning could really be handy and where the lights being part of a larger, monitored system could really pay off. If your lights could learn your habits rather than just switching on and off randomly, it would be that much more convincing. Talking about it to the Vivint techs that installed my lights, they thought it sounded like an exciting possibility as well. Here’s hoping that it’s something the company is looking into.
You can also set up lights manually on schedules. As the person who’s become that dad, constantly reminding everyone to turn off the lights, being able to just have the lights turn off on their own when I know people will be asleep or away makes me quite happy.
Where my switches at?
The thing I might love the most about Vivint’s new lighting, however, are the switches. They fit over your existing switch, so that no one turns it off accidentally (for the lights to work, they need to be powered on, of course). Then it’s just a simple tap to turn on the group they’re assigned to.
What’s so great about that, you ask? They don’t have to go over an existing light switch. You can mount them anywhere! Have a bedside lamp controlled by a light switch across the room and are tired of fumbling around for the switch on the lamp itself? Install a smart bulb, put the switch on the wall next to your nightstand, and marvel how something so simple can make life that much easier.
What’s the catch?
Vivint’s Smart Lighting Bundle is $299 for eight bulbs, a bridge and two light switches. It sounds like a lot, but looking at Hue lighting, for example, a comparable 8-pack of white ambient bulbs, a Hue bridge, and two remote control buttons come to around $280 on Amazon…and you still have to set it all up yourself.
A $5 flat monthly fee is added to your Vivint account when you add smart lighting. The nice thing about your lights being part of a Vivint package is that you don’t have to worry about something going wrong—they’ll replace your hardware if it fails. Though you won’t have to worry, the tech they’re using is proven and seems quite stable since I’ve had it installed. About the most I’ve had to do in the month I’ve been using their smart lights is restart the lighting bridge after a power outage.
Head to Vivint’s site to learn more.
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