These Smart Lights Are So Useful, One Renter Replaced Nearly Every Bulb in Her Apartment
Everything in your home has the potential to complement your tastes and support how you want to use your space. Even things that may seem standard — like say, your lighting — are totally customizable to your needs. Remember: Your home doesn’t tell you how to live, you do!
The trick to having perfect lighting is recognizing that different moments call for different lights — then, shopping accordingly. LIFX‘s smart lights, which you can program from your phone, do everything you knew a light could do, plus some things you didn’t: Make any and every fixture dimmable; change colors when the feeling arises; and automatically adjust their tone and brightness from morning to night. You might have more fun with your lights than you thought possible.
To test how LIFX’s bulbs and strips could transform life at home, we asked Apartment Therapy’s Laina Zissu to try them out in her new apartment and report back.
Personalize the Mood to Your Personality
Laina’s kitchen gets great natural light, but as a multi-tasking space — it’s where she cooks, eats and entertains — its lighting wasn’t easy to customize to her different needs. To solve this, she lined her kitchen with LIFX Lightstrips and used their app to decrease brightness during the day, turn them up when it was time to make dinner, then dim them to add a softer light to her dining area.
The strips ended up replacing the single overhead light in her kitchen, doing a much better job illuminating her counter and breakfast bar. “I have definitely improved my lighting and added character to my home,” Laina says. “Makes you remember how important good lighting in a home is.”
For extra flair, Laina added Lightstrips behind a banquette in her front hallway. They were super easy to set up (you can just stick them to any surface, even around corners!) and Laina loves to scroll through the rainbow of color cycles to match her lighting to her mood.
Lighting That’s Fun and Functional
After dinner, Laina and her fiancé usually end up in the living room. While the city lights emit a warm glow throughout the space, she wanted better mood lighting. So she swapped out all the bulbs in her light fixtures — two standing lamps and one table lamb — with LIFX Clean Bulbs. She especially appreciated being able to dim them and change their colors all at once or individually.
All of LIFX’s lights bring something new to your space, and their Clean Bulbs exemplify this the most. They use high-energy visible (HEV) light to disinfect surfaces and objects that we handle all the time. According to an independent study, Clean Bulbs can kill up to 90% of bacteria (like E. coli) when they’re turned on for 12 hours at 4-foot distance, which was ideal for Laina keeping her cellphone and TV remote clean.
“I love that I can just place my remote down under the light, and with a click of a button on my phone, it is disinfecting something that gets underratedly dirty,” she says. You can also set the bulbs on a schedule to disinfect after you go to bed. And because Clean Bulbs fit wherever you need them, they still light up your space with white, yellow, or any hue you want — the cool blue disinfecting light can be your little secret!
Laina’s favorite part of her new bulbs and strips? More relaxing nights. She can focus on unwinding in the evening and skip the time-consuming step of turning off every light one by one before bed. “Having full control of everything from my phone was the best part,” she says. “I have a very smart home, from my music and TV to my oven, and LIFX works seamlessly together with all of it.”