Even Just Three Smart Lightbulbs Can Change the Way You Live
It's the simplest hack to upgrade your entire living space.
Look, keeping your apartment nice isn’t easy. Even if it just comes down to using the Swiffer once every couple days and taking the trash out before it starts to smell like rotten banana peels and coffee grounds, life just finds a way to sabotage you. Which is why it’s a good thing that, for less than $150, you can completely upgrade the ambiance of your home, apartment, whatever, without having to clean anything up.
Smart lightbulbs have been around for a few years now and, for my money (quite literally), they are one of the most essential purchases for making a space feel more like a home. Not to mention, using them is fun and impressive as hell. They fit most light sockets in any home already, and all it takes is a wifi connection and some cool ideas to use them.
You could set them on a timer, for instance, so that an hour before bedtime, they dim way down. That way you know it’s time to stop wasting time on the computer, go to bed, and start wasting time on your phone. Or, you could set up all kinds of cool, different color combinations for different occasions, like red, white, and blue lights for July 4th, or turn your room purple whenever you listen to Prince. I don’t know; it’s your life.
A good way to dip your toe into the world of smart-lighting is the Philips Hue Color A19 Starter Kit, which contains three smart bulbs that can cycle through all the colors of the rainbow, and the Hue “Bridge”, the gadget that connects to your home wifi and tells it what to do.
Adding more lights is as simple as getting more bulbs and connecting them to your bridge. You can even assign different rooms and preset moods, all from your phone. Yes, you can even program a very-low-light “find my way to the bathroom at 4 a.m.” setup. Truly, we’re living in a beautiful future.
