- Making the Most of Your Smart Home: Common Use Cases - March 28, 2023
- Eco Mode at Night: Maximizing Nest’s Energy Savings - March 20, 2023
- Connecting & Controlling Smart Home Devices: A Guide - March 18, 2023
Disclosure: Links marked with * are Affiliate Links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases if you decide to make a purchase through these links – at no cost for you!
With the right light, you can give your home a nice atmosphere. There are also very good smart outdoor lamps to illuminate your garden, porch or terrace, which you can integrate into your Smart Home.
To help you make the right choice, in this article I have put together the best smart lamps for outdoor use and arranged them by function.
As you will see in the list below, the Philips Hue series* currently dominates the field of smart lamps.
Here is a list of the best smart outdoor lights currently available:
- Spotlight: Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance LED Garden Spot Light*
- Lantern: Philips Hue Inara*
- Path light: Philips Hue Calla*
- Light strips: Philips Hue Light strips*
- Lamp with a camera: Ring Floodlight Cam*
- Switch: TP-Link HS200*
Depending on the situation there is the right solution. You can also start from scratch and replace your current setup. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for yet, read on to get more information about each smart outdoor light.
Table of Contents
Smart Spotlight
A spotlight for the garden has to be easy to operate and be able to withstand all kinds of weather. Simple integration into a Smart Home System is also essential.
When it comes to smart home lamps, Philips Hue is at the forefront right now. Although there are excellent products from other brands for indoor use, outdoor use still seems to be somewhat difficult. Especially the weather resistance is the biggest problem here.
The Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance LED garden spotlight Light* is designed with IP65, which protects it against rain and water jets from the garden hose, for example. Even after a long period of use in areas where it rains a lot, no moisture accumulates inside.
Just like most other smart lamps, you can dim, turn on and off, and change colors with your smartphone or voice command.
To use this smart spotlight, you need the Philips Hue Bridge*, which allows you to connect all your Philips Hue lamps together and integrate them into your Smart Home. Then all lamps can also be controlled with Alexa.
Every Philips Hue outdoor lamp functions as a range extension. As long as the lamps are installed at a distance of no more than ten meters, all lamps are connected to the base.
Smart Lanterns
Check Price:
Even if you don’t have a garden, you can make your house more beautiful with smart outdoor lights and make life easier in some situations.
The first thing I did was replacing my front door lamp with a smart lantern. Until then, I could either turn the light on or off in front of my front door or control it with a motion detector. But I also wanted to have the light on at certain times, even if nobody is in front of the house but still not the whole night.
The right solution for me was the Philips Hue Inara* smart outdoor lamp. Since I already had a few light bulbs from the Philips Hue series, I went with this solution. All I had to do was connect the new outdoor lamp to the Philips Hue Bridge*.
You can also control the lamp with your smartphone or voice command, but the best two features for me were the preset programs and the geofencing. Geofencing means that you can give the lamp or the whole system access to your location. This way the smart outdoor lamp knows when you are coming home and switches on automatically when you are at a certain distance from your home.
With normal motion detectors, I always had the problem that the lamp always came on too late and half the time you were still running around in the dark.
Smart Path Light
Check Price:
16 million different colors! A totally exaggerated advertising argument of the nevertheless ingenious Phillips Hue Calla*.
This smart path light from the Philips Hue system has a very attractive design, does what it should and can easily be integrated into an existing Smart Home system. But you need the Philips Hue Bridge*, the central nervous system in the Philips Hue series. Interestingly, this base only costs a fraction of the actual lamps.
This allows you to control not only your smart light bulbs in the house but also your smart lamps outside in your garden.
Here are some more facts about this lamp:
- It can be operated via smartphone and voice command.
- You can switch them on/off or dim them at fixed times.
- Connects to Alexa.
- The lamps must be positioned within a radius of 10 meters of the next lamp or base so that they can establish a connection.
- You can define different programs and switch on the right light according to your mood.
Smart Light Strip for Beds or Paths
Check Price:
With the right light, you can make a lot out of your garden – and it doesn’t always have to be just individual lamps or spotlights. There are also whole LED light strips with which you can embellish a boundary e.g. between bed and lawn.
Just like the path light from Philips, the Philips Hue light strip* can illuminate your garden individually. The light strip is completely waterproof and excellent e.g. for the delimitation of beds.
Just like all other Philips Hue lighting systems, you can control the light strip with Alexa or with an app from your smartphone.
So you can quickly set the right light for every situation. For example, you could set the standard to white, create a special program for a barbecue evening and change the light strip between Christmas colors at Christmas time.
And as always with Philips Hue, the lamps can be very easily and quickly integrated into your Smart Home system.
Smart Outdoor Light with Camera
Check Price:
If you want to illuminate and monitor large areas of your garden or front garden at the same time, there are lamps for this.
The Ring Floodlight Cam* is a perfect choice. With its 2 powerful LED spotlights it can illuminate a large area brightly and with the built-in HD camera, you can monitor everything that happens in front of the camera with your smartphone.
You can also set an automatic notification if something moves in front of the camera. Then your smartphone will let you know when someone’s outside your house. Either take a closer look at what’s going on with the sharp 1080p HD live image or speak directly to the person using the intercom feature.
In the worst case, the alarm can also be switched on via the smartphone at the push of a button.
If you travel a lot, such a device gives you a lot of peace of mind even if you are not at home. Especially when I’m on vacation I don’t want to miss my smart camera in front of the house anymore. You always worry that something will happen and with this camera you know that your home is safe and untouched.
If security is important to you, but you don’t want to invest in such a camera with built-in spotlights, there are also excellent smart doorbells or stand-alone cameras that can let you know when something happens and send a live broadcast to your mobile phone. Further down in this article I present the best devices in the two categories.
Smart Light Switch
Check Price:
Before you replace all your lamps in your garden, consider simply replacing the light switch for your outdoor lights with a smart light switch. So you can save a lot of money and still get a smart lighting system in your garden.
In addition, you may also be in a situation where you have only recently exchanged your lamps for energy-saving LEDs and now do not want to invest in expensive equipment again immediately.
My favorite is the TP-Link HS200* light switch. This light switch can easily be connected to Alexa or other Smart Home systems and has a very elegant and appealing design. But even without Alexa & Co, you can control the light switch with the “Kasa Smart” App. You can create commands and programs that run automatically.
Other Smart Home Outdoor Devices
Smart Doorbell
Check Price:
With a smart doorbell, you can see who’s at your door from your smartphone and talk to them. My favorite is the Ring Wi-Fi Enabled Video Doorbell*.
This smart doorbell sends an alarm to your smartphone as soon as a movement is detected outside your door. Of course, you can set this motion sensor to only cover the area directly in front of your door. So you avoid an alarm when a car passes by or something like that.
The video recordings are in HD and at night with infrared night vision.
You can also connect this doorbell to Alexa so that the ringtone sounds through the Alexa system and the live recording from the front door can also be played back with suitable Alexa devices – e.g. the Amazon Echo Show 5*.
Smart Security Camera
Check Price:
If you not only want to secure the area directly in front of your door, there are also special security cameras that you can integrate into your Smart Home.
In my opinion, the NetGear Arlo Q* camera has the best price/performance ratio because it shoots excellent pictures, even in complete darkness.
In addition, you don’t have to buy additional storage space as an upgrade like with many other providers of such security cameras. Cloud storage for 7 days of video and audio is included.
Of course, this camera also offers many setting options. You can only let it run at certain times or only if it detects a movement. The motion sensor reaches up to 15 meters and even in the dark, you can still take sharp pictures at a distance of 8 meters.
Smart Garage Door Opener
Check Price:
MyQ Smart Garage Door Opener* is a smart garage door opener that lets you open and close your garage from anywhere. This gadget is not only interesting for the typical neighbor who doesn’t own any tools, but you can also open the garage from work for your gardener so that he can start working.
Summary
In recent years, the Smart Home topic has gained more and more momentum, resulting in even better products and a constantly growing variety of possible applications.
A lot has happened especially with lamps, lanterns and other smart lights for outdoor use. No matter what your property looks like and what kind of applications you are looking for – there is always a good solution!
Attention: When installing electronic equipment, please be sure to observe the manufacturer’s safety instructions. You have to take care of your own safety. The information on this site only helps you to learn.
Disclosure: This website is the property of Martin Lütkemeyer and is operated by Martin Lütkemeyer. Martin Lütkemeyer is a member of the Amazon Services LLC Affiliate Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to enable Web sites to earn advertising revenue through advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Links marked with * are affiliate links.