You may not know it, but the lights in your home play a significant role in your mood, health and stress levels. Proper lighting can help you feel better, be more productive and enjoy better sleep.

This is before we even get to how your light fixtures impact your home’s décor and energy efficiency. With intelligent lighting control systems and automation, you get all these benefits and more. Here are the top three benefits of smart lighting control for residents of Monmouth County, NJ.

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BETTER HEALTH AND MORE ENERGY

Smart lighting control has revolutionized the effect of your lights on your health. The two technologies that make this possible are “warm-dimming” LEDs and tunable white lighting.

Older LEDs used cool dimming, which gave off a cooler, blue tone when the fixtures were dimmed. This type of dimming made the fixtures more efficient, but the color temperature was off-putting and made many people feel more awake when they were trying to wind down at the end of the day. This response from our bodies reflects our circadian rhythms, or internal biological clocks, which are governed in part by light. Cooler tones energize us, while warmer light mimics the conditions when we’re more at rest around sunrise and sunset.

Warm dimming LEDs don’t emit light with that cooler temperature when they’re dimmed. Tunable white lighting takes this a step further by letting you set your LEDs to emit light at whatever color you want. Together, tunable white lighting and warm dimming let you control the color temperature and brightness separately of one another.

How does all this impact your health? Simply put, lighting control systems with these technologies help the lighting in your home better mimic the pattern of the sun throughout the day, which helps your body better align with your circadian rhythm.

You’ll drift off to sleep more easily as your lights gradually fade to a warm, soft glow, then wake up refreshed with your personal sunrise as your lights gradually brighten in the morning. During the middle of the day, cooler color temperatures help stimulate productivity. And it’s all due to the lights in your home.

SIMPLE, STREAMLINED CONTROL

Another key benefit of smart lighting is how it gives you one central control system for all the fixtures in your home. Aside from the added convenience of being able to adjust any fixture anytime you want right from your  , tablet, or wall mounted device, there are other perks to enjoy.

You can make controlling your lights even more convenient using lighting scenes. Scenes are presets you create for common situations or moods. These can be scenes that only involve your lights, or you can create combination scenes using your lights and other automation systems and features.

One option is a “Dinner” scene that dims the lights in your kitchen, lowers your motorized shades, turns on your home audio system and fires up your favorite playlist of music to relax to. For a simpler choice, an “Away” setting that shuts off all the lights at once is very handy when you’re in a rush to get out the door. And if you forget any lights on your way out, simply pull out your phone and turn them off remotely.

INCREASED ENERGY EFFICIENCY

Smart lighting control is a very effective way to reduce your home’s energy costs. This primarily goes back to the LEDs used in smart lighting systems.

LED bulbs use 70-80 percent less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs. Compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs are also more inefficient than incandescents, but LEDs are much safer to handle than CFLs.

Dimming also produces exceptional efficiency dividends. Every percentage point of dimming results in an equivalent percentage point in energy reduction. In more practical terms, dimming your bulbs by 50 percent means you’ll use 50 percent less energy to light them. When you consider the number of LEDs needed to adequately light a home, you can see how those savings quickly add up.

When you consider all smart lighting has to offer in terms of health, control and efficiency gains, it’s clear that installing these systems is a bright idea. To learn more about smart lighting control, call us at (877) 550-5150, click on the chat box in the corner of your browser or fill out our online contact sheet.