What Is a Smart Lighting Bridge?

When it comes to smart homes, sometimes they can be confusing—especially when it comes to ensuring everything is properly connected and the devices integrate with each other.

With Vivint Smart Lighting, however, it’s simple to integrate your existing lighting into your Vivint system. Your once-basic lighting becomes smart lighting you can customize to make your home more convenient and secure.

The Smart Lighting Bridge helps make this possible by connecting your smart lighting products and smart lighting devices to your Vivint system, expanding the power of your smart home to your lights.

Smart home lighting basics

Smart lighting is an essential part of a smart home security system. Your lights play a major role in your home beyond just helping you see when it’s dark. They provide security, help you monitor your home and property, and even help you decorate for the holidays.

Smart lighting allows you to control, personalize, and automate both indoor and outdoor lighting. A few things you can do with smart lights include:

• Turn lights on or off from any location via a single app
• Automate lights to turn on or off at a certain time
• Set room groups, such as “downstairs lights” or “bedrooms,” and control them from your app or Smart Hub
• Control your lights with your voice with Google Home or Amazon Alexa
• Use outdoor lighting devices that feature Smart Deter to help deter lurkers on your property
• Integrate your lighting with your smart home to create custom actions, such as automatically turning entryway lights on when you unlock your door
• Turn lamps into smart lights with the Smart Plug, allowing you to control your lamps as well as overhead lighting
• Improve your home’s security with outside lighting equipped with motion sensors
• Use pathlights to illuminate your walkway and driveway

Smart lighting improves your home’s security by making it simple to turn lights on and off, even when you’re away from home. It also makes it easier to control the lights from inside your house. So if you’re already in bed or you’re on your way to work and forgot to turn out the lights, you can do it right from your phone.

Smart lighting also uses LED Philips Hue bulbs, which last longer and use less energy than incandescent lights. So not only will you save money on your electric bill, but you’ll be replacing bulbs less, too.

How the smart lighting bridge works

Before we go into how the bridge works, it’s helpful to understand a little more about how smart homes in general work. In order for your smart home devices to work together, they have to be able to communicate with each other via a wireless smart home protocol, such as Wi-Fi, Zigbee, or Bluetooth. Once the devices are connected, they can communicate with each other; for example, your voice assistant communicates with your smart bulbs, allowing you to turn lights on and off with the sound of your voice.

A smart lighting bridge works by connecting your smart lighting products, such as your smart bulbs and your Smart Lighting Switch, with the rest of your Vivint Smart Home system. By enabling communication between your smart lighting products, they’re all able to work together rather than as a single unit. You can connect up to 50 smart light bulbs and switches to your bridge.

The Smart Lighting Bridge connects to your home’s Wi-Fi, then uses the Zigbee network to group your lighting products. This is beneficial because rather than connecting each and every smart light bulb to your home’s Wi-Fi network, they connect to the bridge.

The bridge is also a simple DIY project that doesn’t require electricians or special equipment—all you need is a power outlet and Wi-Fi router. Simply plug the bridge into a power supply, connect to your Wi-Fi, and follow the instructions to pairing your smart bulbs. And because the bridge is wired instead of battery-powered, you don’t have to worry about changing batteries or losing power.

Smart lighting bridge benefits

By helping transform your lighting into smart lights, the bridge simplifies your lighting and enables you to do much more with it. As part of a Vivint Smart Home, your Smart Lighting Bridge lets you:

• Control your lights with your phone, Smart Hub, or voice assistant
• Create custom automations, so lights turn on and off automatically based on triggers such as locking or unlocking the door or arming your security system
• Make any light motion-activated by connecting your lights to motion sensors, so lights turn on automatically when you enter the room
• Integrate lighting with your security cameras
• Extend Vivint’s Smart Deter to any light in your home, helping protect your home when you’re home and away
• Enable the Away Lighting feature, which randomizes lighting in the house in the evening, mimicking occupancy to help deter break-ins
• Dim your lighting right from your phone
• Turn any existing light into a smart light simply by adding a new bulb and connecting to the bridge

With the Smart Lighting Bridge, you can expand the power of your smart home’s lighting, bringing greater convenience, safety, and peace of mind to your home.

Smart lighting bridge FAQs

Q: Do I need a Vivint Smart Home to use Vivint Smart Lighting features?

A: Vivint Smart Lighting is part of the Vivint ecosystem. In order to experience the full benefits, you’ll need a Vivint Smart Home system.

Q: Do I need multiple Smart Lighting Bridges?

A: No, only one Smart Lighting Bridge is needed. Up to 50 devices can be connected to a single Smart Lighting Bridge.

A smarter way to light your home

Whether you want to add Vivint Smart Lighting to your existing system or customize a brand new system, getting started is easy. Contact our Smart Home Pros at 855.822.1220 today to learn more.