Smart home technology has expanded dramatically over the past few years, and there’s no shortage of cool tech to help you with your holiday decorating. Halloween is especially great for smart home gadgets, as you’ll find a variety of products available that create unique lighting and sounds – as well as some ways to modify them to create a spooky atmosphere.
With so many products available, it can be difficult to know where to start. If you need some help sorting through all the options, here’s a look at which smart home devices are best for Halloween — and how they can make your home the talk of the neighborhood.
light it up
One system worth checking out is the Sylvania Smart+ range (branded as Osram Lightify in some countries), which includes indoor and outdoor lighting options including standard A19 bulbs, LED floods and spotlights, and flexible light strips, as well as outdoor garden lights. White and color options are available, and the color choice runs into the thousands – perfect for holiday lighting.
Along with its own apps (for Android and iOS devices), you can also control Sylvania Smart+ bulbs through partner systems like SmartThings, Belkin WeMo, and Wink Hub. Voice control options include Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, while some indoor bulbs benefit from using Apple HomeKit/Siri support. So, if you’ve already invested in a smart home system, you’ll find that you can add Smart+/Lightify bulbs to your setup without the need for additional controllers.
The $75 Sylvania Smart LED Zigbee RGBW Outdoor Accent Kit includes nine 14-foot outdoor RGB lights and an outdoor, wet-rated power supply. Keep in mind that these lights require a ZigBee hub to function properly.
The lights are mounted on small, plastic nails that can be easily inserted into a lawn or flower bed. The cables are also flexible, making it easy to point the LEDs toward the house, trees or ornaments. If you’re mounting the lights on a deck, stairs, or another flat surface, you can use a screwdriver to remove the LED from the spike and surface mount.
A great alternative to these Sylvania lights are the Govee Outdoor Spot Lights, a two-pack of which is regularly priced at $70. As the name suggests, these essentially work as spotlights to illuminate large sections of your home (or yard) in different colors. And since they don’t require a hub, they’re a simple solution to help you create a spooky atmosphere.
For eerie garden lighting, it’s a simple task to install the Lily Outdoor Spotlight to illuminate walls or create spooky lights for trees, while the Calla Outdoor Pathway Lights help trick-or-treaters find their way to the front door. Can do. The 16-foot flexible lightstrip can bend around decks, curved flower beds and pathways for added decoration. These new outdoor additions to the range are both water and weather resistant, with operating temperatures down to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit, and they plug easily into an outdoor power outlet and support interconnection, so they can be easily linked together .
For the porch, welcome trick-or-treaters with the portable Philips Hue Go, a rechargeable battery-powered RGB lamp that supports 16 million colors or tunable white light. Three hours of battery life is quite short, but it will get you through the peak sweet hours of the evening.
Sync them for a scary atmosphere
Now it’s time to sync the lights with your smart home controller. Sylvania’s Lightify app isn’t the slickest smart home software, but supports basic power controls, dimming, and an RGB color picker. Begin the connecting process by opening the Sylvania Lightify app. Go equipment and click Add Button to launch device search. The app should detect the lights immediately (if not, turn them off and on again to reset connectivity). You are now ready to connect the lights with your app.
Since these are RGB LEDs, you can now adjust the lighting palette to find the scariest color. Sadly, you can only select a single color for all the LEDs that are on at any one time, but the light is bright and the color rendition is quite good too.
Indoors, you can synchronize your outdoor lights with additional Sylvania smart bulbs, but there are other options, too. Philips Hue is a popular smart lighting range with a wide range of bulbs, lamps and lighting fixtures as well as a dedicated developer community. The company, a leader in indoor smart LED lighting solutions for over six years, has recently expanded its range with a number of outdoor lights.
While Hue works with a variety of smart home kits and controllers from other manufacturers (including Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, and Google Assistant), you’ll need a starter kit with a Philips Hue bridge that connects to your router. The Philips Hue White Starter Kit offers the cheapest entry point, bundling the bridge with two tunable white bulbs – but the resulting effect won’t be particularly spine-chilling.
Alternatively, a white and colored Ambience Starter Kit packs a Zigbee-powered Hue bridge and four E26 RGB bulbs. It’s certainly not the cheapest smart lighting system available, but it includes everything you need to create great effects around the home.
add scary sound effects
To raise the hair a bit, try combining your lights with audio effects using Hue Labs’ Halloween Living Scenes or the third-party Hue Halloween (iOS/Android) and Hue Haunted House (iOS/Android) apps . Pair your smartphone or tablet with a hidden Bluetooth speaker, then launch the app.
This triggers a series of dramatic lighting scenes on your Hue bulbs with eerie sound effects. Creaking doors, sinister footsteps, thunder and lightning, eerie groans, screeching witches, and much more. You can instruct the apps to automatically play a continuous “scarescape” of themes and effects or test your mixing skills with a freestyle freak-out.
It’s great fun for kids (but definitely too scary for younger kids), and when paired with the Philips Hue motion sensor, the combo offers real potential to scare the neighbors. Watch the video below, which features a combination of a Philips Hue Go lamp and a Bose SoundLink Mini Bluetooth speaker – both small enough to hide near the front porch or in a bush behind the front door.
let the doorbell bring fear
Your lighting can make your front yard feel like Silent Hill, but you can use a smart doorbell to play a real scary sound the moment an unknown trick-or-treater rings the doorbell. As an added bonus, you can replace your doorbell with a different faceplate that fits the theme of the season.
When someone presses your Ring Doorbell, you can ask Alexa to answer. This works fine if you’re not there, but a better approach is to answer the doorbell yourself. You can react with horror when the doorbell rings, or you can let Ring do the work for you with one of their built-in responses.
Ring isn’t the only company branching out for the scariest time of the year. Several new sound effects have also been added to the Google Nest Doorbell, including ghosts, witches, monsters, and more. These Halloween-inspired sounds can play whenever someone rings the doorbell.
When the excitement subsides and the front doorbell stops ringing, settle down in front of your favorite horror movie, with the cool enhanced by the Philips Hue Play light bar. Designed to sit behind a TV or computer monitor, Hue Play cleverly coordinates colored lighting with the activity shown on the screen, enhancing the ambiance of the room for movies, music and video games.
Once you’ve made the initial investment in smart home technology, you’ll be ready for any holiday or special occasion. Experiment with different lighting schemes or preset themes from third-party apps to create a welcoming, festive or spooky atmosphere around the house.