Holiday Smart Lighting Tips and Tricks

Want to have some fun with your smart lighting this holiday season?

While smart lighting offers year-round benefits, such as ease of control and circadian quality-of-life improvements, that doesn’t mean that you can’t take some time to have a little bit of holiday fun with your smart lighting. 

To do that, we turned to all the expert elves that work here at AV Design Consultants and had them wrack their brains for exciting and fun ways to use your smart lighting to really transform your house for the holidays. We hope that with these tips, you’ll be able to wow your family and guests, and show everyone just how much fun smart home automation and technology can be! 

So, before the hot cocoa cools down and the holidays are over, let’s take a look at some ways you can use your smart lighting to make your holidays this year extra memorable ... and extra smart! 

A Welcoming Wonderland

They say that first impressions are everything, and that goes for people’s first impression of your home, as well.

Instead of having a dark driveway and front yard, outdoor smart lighting and path lighting is a great way to “greet” your guests before you actually greet them. Lights can be set to turn on anytime a car pulls into the driveway, or set on a timer or schedule, giving you a great way to help people find their way through the yard and to the front door. 

Especially for older guests who may need extra time or help to walk down slippery walkways or sidewalks, exterior and path lighting make sure that your guests’ whole time spent visiting your home is welcoming, inviting, and safe from start to finish. 

Even better, tunable landscape lighting can be used to create a themed outdoor space, giving you a whole new outdoor area to use as a canvas for your holiday decorating. 

Thematic Scenery 

We never get over this moment: There’s just something special about selecting a scene from your smart lighting controller and watching all the lights in the house change to their adjusted settings at once.

Smart lighting can do that year-round, but how can you really make that work out for the holidays? Different scenes, of course!

For example, you could select a daylight theme that dims the lights and adjusts their color to a soft gold, which would perfectly reflect off the tree’s ornaments and give a welcoming aura throughout the home. 

For the evening, you could pick out a festive scene that baths the whole house – indoors and out – in red and green tones, really helping to enhance that holiday spirit. You can even program the scene to only light up certain areas in the green tones, helping differentiate between areas of the home and highlight specific artwork or decorations. 

Of course, setting up and programming all these scenes is a bit of extra work, and who really has extra time during the holidays? We do! This is the perfect reason to give us a call at 479-365-2201 – we can get you set up with custom smart lighting that will brighten your home for the whole holiday season. 

Let There Be (Smart) Light 

Now, most of the technology we talk about here is all professionally installed solutions, but we wanted to make one little exception for this time of the year and talk about a product that we think you’ll be able to handle on your own.

When you are decorating this year, you will probably realize that you have a lot of individual devices that aren’t smart, and thus, can’t be controlled by the rest of your smart home or lighting controls. Tree lighting, outdoor balcony lights, or even those fancy light displays and inflatable characters all come to mind ... but what if you want the same convenience in control that you have with the rest of your smart home?

Well, that’s where smart plugs come in. Do-it-yourself smart plugs let you turn anything into a smart device, and it beats having to climb behind the tree to unplug the lights before heading to bed every night, that’s for sure. 

A Delightful Dining Experience

Sitting around the table with friends and family is one of the central holiday experiences, and it’s also one that smart lighting can help improve upon!

Not only can smart lighting help with the ambiance for dinner, it can help with the prep work, as well. With spot lighting in the kitchen, you can turn on bright lights that illuminate the cutting, chopping, and prepping areas – giving you a professionally lit area to help put together your festive feast of champions.

That type of lighting isn’t going to work for the actual dining experience, however. Fixing that is easy: Simply select your preset dining scene and watch as the overhead lights mimic candlelight, casting bright and vibrant shades across the dining table. It’s a way to put your best foot forward – and create a holiday meal that’s illuminated by smart technology and will create memories for years to come. 

Winter may be the darkest time of the year, but that’s no reason to stay in the dark. With these ideas – and our expert installers – we can easily get you set up with smart lighting that can help ring in the holidays and light your house into the new year and beyond. Give us a call at 479-365-2201 today, and make sure to have happy holidays, from all of us here at AV Design Consultants!