This underrated smart light feature lets you use your bulbs as timers – here’s how
Hate loud alarms? Use your smart lights as a timer instead
Hate loud alarms? If you have smart lights set up in your house, you can use them as timers and alarms instead – here’s how.
Replacing your ‘normal’ light bulbs with smart ones is a must if you want to take advantage of thousands of colours, different brightness levels and remote use. There are plenty of handy tricks you can use your smart lights for – like having them tell you if someone’s broken into your house – but an underrated feature that I recently discovered is you can use your smart lights as timers.
A loud, blaring timer or alarm can get annoying very quickly. When I set a timer on my phone while I’m cooking, I always find myself nearly jumping out of my skin when it goes off. So, to avoid this, I’ve started using my Philips Hue smart bulb as a timer instead.
The Philips Hue app offers light alarms and timers, so it’s extremely easy to set these up if you have a Philips Hue lighting ecosystem. How the timers work is that you can set a specific lighting scene to show after a certain amount of time, or you can customise the light to turn from one colour to another, with the latter colour signalling that time is up.
In the Philips Hue app, head to the Automations section, tap ‘+’ and select Timer. From there, you can choose how long you want the timer to last which you can choose from as little as a minute and as long as 24 hours. Next, choose the room – you can choose a specific room or all rooms in your home with bulbs in – and pick the lighting scene or colour you want to show when the timer is up.
That’s it! Once you’ve set everything up, your timer will show up in the app with a play button next to it. To trigger the timer, simply press play and the timer will do everything for you.
I’ve found this to be extremely handy, and much less jumpy than when I use my phone timer! I have a cooking timer set up for 20 minutes for my kitchen light bulb, and when the timer ‘goes off’, the light flashes a bright pink colour. The possibilities really are endless with this, and can be used for multiple different timers and functions around your home.
This timer feature could also be used for waking you up in the morning in place of your phone alarm or alarm clock. It’s a handy trick which allows you to turn your smart lights into a wake up light if you want to wake up more naturally, and you want to take advantage of your existing lighting before making the move to an actual wake up light.
