SMART LIGHTS
Control, Brightness, color, scenes, monitoring
We use lights daily at our homes. One disadvantage of normal bulbs is their rigidity. They have fixed light intensity, white light, can never be scheduled or automated.
Smart lighting in now available in Kenya. We design lighting set up that will solve all your problems of controlling the lights. Offer solutions that will allow you to adjust brightness, color, and control the lights from your phone whether at home or away.
Phillips Hue
Phillips Hue is the leader in smart lighting products. Phillips has a bridge, various types of bulbs, motion sensors, switches, dimmers, table top lamps, light strips, wall lights, path lights, pendant lights floor lights, and even spot lights. Phillips makes it very easy to group lights, dim lights and create scenes. Phillips lights use a console that enables the lights to respond to the music you are playing. You can literary have a complete date in a Philips hue lit home. You can dim lights in red to create a romantic dinner ambiance, then set the soft or disco lights to make night disco, then lights can sync with the Television to make a cinema room and finally to white daylight or warm light to turn it back to a family home again. Phillips white and color ambiance bulbs cost ksh 6, 500 each. The Strip lights 2 meters costs 10,000 and have all the 16 million colors. The dimmer switch would cost ksh 5, 000 and finally you will need to have the bridge that communicates with all other Philips devices to make them work. It costs ksh 15, 000.
Xiaomi Lights
Xiaomi is disrupting the smart lighting and smart homes in Nairobi with its highly efficient and yet cheaper. They have been making smart homes gadgets for mainland China only until recently when they decided to go global. Their products are very effective, compatible with google home, apple, Alexa and can be run on many platforms including the smart things and google home. Mi bulbs usually cost ksh 2500, the hub costs ksh 12, 000 while other things like ceiling lights cost ksh 4000.
Xiaomi has a wide eco system of products. Some lights that belong to the Xiaomi eco systems include Aqara lights and eco-systems that is designed for compatibility with Iphone and Apple products. There are Yee lights, and Mijia products. The ecosystem is wide and from whichever you choose your lights, they guarantee relaibility and value for money.
Zigbee vs Wifi lights
Smart lights exist as wifi, Z-wave and Zigbee bulbs.
Wifi bulbs connect to wifi directly and receive commands through the Wifi. They receive their schedules and routines directly over wifi. You will need to connect this bulb with wifi to use it in automation.
Zigbee bulbs (and z-wave) connect through a network called zigbee (or z-wave) to a hub. A hub is a device that creates a mesh network of all zigbee devices in the house, The Hub then connects to the internet. Zigbee network is lightweight (the highest speed it can hit is 250kbs). The hub functions by storing automations and schedules. Automations sent to the smart lighting remotely got through the hub.
Zigbee solves the problem of having several devices connecting to the home internet, consuming the bandwidth. Automations over zigbee are intact even when the wifi is down. Another advantage of zigbee is that devices that run on zigbee technology consume very low power. Devices as door contact sensors and motion sensors that run on zigbee can go for several months with battery because the network is not intensive.
Finally, Zigbee creates a mesh network. Each device addition creates a stronger network. The topology of the network does not involve having a direct connection to the hub but a web where each device can connect to each other.
At tommie's Smart Homes, we prefer Zigbee system for big projects to reduce stress on the router. Wifi bulbs are good for small to mid size homes. The downside of zigbee is that they are slightly expensive to acquire.
