IoT Lights

The challenge - the builder of the church wound up doing something that was, umm, not so smart. In our backyard they installed 3 lights. 2 of them are normal, the 3rd is a motion detector. The not smart part is they are all on the same switch. If we shut the switch off, then the motion detector does not work at night. If we leave the switch on, then the non motion detector lights are on 24/7.  I decided to address the problem by looking at IoT lights.

One of my friends recently built a house and he had Insteon installed everywhere.  The hub is $149. The switches are $69 each. Then I counted up my light switches, 70. Now obviously I would not have to change them all out, but I really started thinking about what lights I would want to control, and this solution just did not seem to make sense, from a fiscal standpoint.

Another gent I work with has the Hue system. He swears by them. Openly admits they are not cheap, compared to regular bulbs, but preaches that it changes everything. The starter kit, which is the hub and 3 bulbs is $199. 

Setup was very simple, starting with Amazon frustration free packing FTW! Once the hub is plugged in the lights automatically find it. You then install the app on your phone, and pair with the hub, by pressing a button on the front of the hub. I am guessing it's a security feature. Prevents someone from pairing with your hub and taking over your lights, since you have to have physical access to it. 

Now here is the cool part. Once everything is setup up you can control the lights with IFTTT. I created a recipe to turn the lights on at 5 PM and off at Midnight. Allows us to have all the lights on when we want them. The 2 IoT ones during the evening and the motion detector all night. 

Another ridiculously cool thing is the Echo integration. Now we can simply ask Alexa to turn our lights off and on. 

Enter the slippery slope. The lights were just too cool to not get more. I wound up switching out the builds in many of our rooms. Once you have more than one light in a room you can select a theme. The multi-color LED’s will paint the room in color. I truly lack the words to describe how awesome it is to light a room up with the different themes.