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There are oodles of smart bulbs out there. I actually have a combination of all three going on right now, and there are pros and cons of each. There are a number of ways to make your lights smart: There are smart bulbs, smart switches, and smart plugs. There are some differences between Alexa and Siri, and we’ll get to those later.
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Pulling out my phone and asking Siri to turn on my lights isn’t too burdensome, but it did confuse my friend, who thought I was asking her to do my bidding. Enter the Amazon Dot: The $50 puck imbued with Alexa, paired with a Bluetooth speaker.Īs my condo is just 850 square feet, I can shout at Alexa to turn on my lights from pretty much anywhere. That means I could use HomeKit-compatible bulbs, but if he wanted to turn on the lights via voice-control, we needed another option. First, I have an iPhone, while my husband uses an Android device. I can’t even count the number of LED and smart lightbulbs I have lying around, but when picking out smart lights for the DT smart apartment, I had a number of factors to consider. They’re installed like regular lightbulbs and with a 20+-year lifespan, it’s important that they’re portable.
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Lights are one of the easiest and most affordable entrances to a smart home, and smart bulbs are perfect for apartment dwellers. In the Smart Apartment series, we’ll look at gadgets that are affordable, portable, and hopefully useful.Īnd for the first installment, I wanted to tackle lighting. At the end of the series, we’ll examine the smart apartment as an ecosystem, and how all these devices - or do not - work together.ĭigital Trends is outfitting a condo in Seattle with tons of smart-home devices suited for an apartment. Each week, we’ll tackle a different category and look at various products, then explain how we made our selections. That’s why we decided to outfit a whole condo with smart devices that don’t require rewiring or permanent installation. Plus, apartments have different needs than single-family homes. Smart-home devices sometimes require complicated installation that just doesn’t make sense for renters.