smart light switch

One of the easiest ways to keep bad guys away from your home is to keep the exterior well-lit throughout the night. The problem with this strategy is the need to manually turn on the exterior lights every night when the sun goes down.

If I’m not home during this time, I obviously can’t turn the lights on. In addition, I don’t enjoy coming home to a pitch-black front yard. On some evenings, I may be lying in bed while watching the Tiger King…and you can probably guess I’m not going to get up to turn the lights on.

I realized it was time to treat my inner lazy spirit with some smart light switches. If you are looking to ‘up-your-automation-game”, I would highly suggest looking into buying some automated smart light switches as well.

 

What Is A Smart Light Switch?

When you are considering adding automated lights to your home, you’ll need to decide which route you want to go:

Smart Light Bulbs or Smart Light Switches?

There are benefits to both smart bulbs and smart switches. In my opinion, the smart light switch is a better option because you only have to buy the automated technology once. This will allow you to replace the regular bulbs like normal, but you will always have the power of automating them.

All you have to do is install the light switch and you can control the automation from your phone or other smart devices.

 

What Smart Light Switch Should I Buy?

I’m a cheapskate, so I did some Amazon surfing to find the least expensive smart light with the most reviews. (I typically do this for any purchase I make on Amazon)

The automated smart light switch winner was the TreatLife Single Pole Switch. This was perfect for my lights because it didn’t need to be a 3-way switch and it had all the bells and whistles I needed:

treatlife smart light switch for home automation

NOTE: This smart light switch requires a neutral wire for installation

Technically, I wasn’t looking for remote control or voice-controlled lights. The main reason I bought the TreatLife light switches was for the scheduling feature.

I’m sure there will be a time in the future for using these other capabilities, but for now, I’ll set them up and let the smart light switches do their magic.

 

Light Switch Installation

These TreatLife switches were pretty easy to install. It probably took me about 20 minutes to get the first one replaced. Once the light switch was in the wall, I needed to sync it to the app on my phone.

The syncing process was harder than it should have been, but not because of the product. I had an issue because my iPhone needed to “allow” this product to sync correctly (but there was a slight disconnect).

All in all, the light switch worked seamlessly and I was able to quickly schedule it to automatically turn on/off the lights each day.

 

Are Smart Light Switches Worth It?

If you read the title of this article, you probably would’ve guessed that these bad boys are most definitely dope AF. I bought two more automated light switches because I immediately saw a huge return on my investment.

For about $50 (for all 3 light switches), I was able to eliminate a daily task from my life forever. The lights will also help deter anyone from doing any suspicious activities around my home and I won’t have to think about managing them while I’m out of town.

If you want to get even more out of the light switches, you can set up voice control via Alexa or Google Home. I’m not a big fan of talking to Alexa throughout my day, so I’m going to keep those tasks manual for now.

 

Start Automating Your  Home Lights

I highly recommend automating your lights at home, too. It’s a great feeling to see the lights on when driving up to our house at night and seeing them turned off in the morning.

If you think you are ready to remove this mundane task, take a look at the automated smart light switch options on Amazon.

 

Read Also: Top 10 Ways to Automate Your Cleaning

 

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