Lighting it up (in vivid colour)

Most people know pink is my favourite colour, but I wasn’t expecting the lights in my home office to suddenly start flashing hot pink, soft pink and magenta while I was on a call.

I heard giggles from upstairs as my office exploded with colour like a nightclub at 1 a.m. The kids had gotten hold of my husband’s iPhone. Can you imagine how funny it would have looked if I’d been on a video call?

How did the kids control the lights in my office from another floor? They’d like to say it’s because they’re Hogwarts students, but really it’s because my office now has “smart” lighting that’s controlled by an app.

The folks at Lowe’s and RONA recentl sent me the Sengled Element Colour Plus Hub Smart Home Lighting Kit, which retails for about $119. It includes a hub that you plug into your router anywhere in your home (so the bulbs can connect to the internet) and two of the most magical LED bulbs you could imagine.

They look like ordinary white light bulbs and they’re rated to last 25,000 hours (which seems to be the average for LEDs), but they can turn 16 million different colours. Sixteen million!

It took me less than five minutes to (A) locate our router, and (B) plug in the hub. Once I downloaded their app (Sengled Element, available in the App store and Google Play Store) and “named” my bulbs, I could set them to lighting schemes like Romantic or Relaxed — or just go wild swirling my finger from neon green to blazing hot pink and royal blue.

Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …