You can have your Philips Hue lights turn on automatically at a certain time, but here’s how to automatically turn on your Philips Hue lights when you get home, no matter the day or night.
Philips Hue lights are essentially smart connected lights that let you wirelessly turn them on and off from your smartphone, but they can do so much more than that.
The official Philips Hue app lets you set alarms and timers for your lights, as well as enable a feature called geofencing, which lets your lights turn on automatically when you get home or turn them off whenever you leave.
Something like this can be great if you forgot to turn off a light in your house and don’t want it to stay on all day, or if you really don’t want to mess with the light switches and want everything to be automatic.
Of course, some people like to leave some lights on when they’re away from home, like they’re going on vacation and they don’t want anyone to peek around and get any ideas, but if you’re on your way to work, enabling geofencing will allow you to forget about the light switches altogether and your lights will automatically turn off when you get home that day. allows it to open.
If that’s something that interests you, here’s how to turn on the Philips Hue lights when you get home; all this is done automatically.
Turning On the Philips Hue Lights When You Come Home
There are several ways to do this, but perhaps the easiest method is to use the official Philips Hue app.
To set it up, simply open the Philips Hue app and tap the Menu button in the upper left corner. From there select it from the list.
Next, you will be shown two options: and . Tap on it and it will then display a map and show a pin showing your current location, so make sure you’re at home while you set all this up.
At the bottom, tap on scene, scene and then select the scene you want to activate and open when you get home. You may need to create a unique scene if you want certain lights to turn on, but you may have already made one.
You can choose to have your lights turn on automatically only when you get home after sunset. Once you’ve decided, tap in the top right corner to complete the setup and enable geofencing that will automatically turn on your lights when you get home.
The only downside to this method is that there is no way to set the geofencing barrier, so if you want finer control over how close you need to be to your home before your lights go on, then I recommend using IFTTT. a better interface especially for that.
Using IFTTT
We’ve covered how to use IFTTT and how to use it with your Philips Hue lights before, but here’s how to set your lights to come on automatically when you get home.
We have detailed a similar process before on how to automatically turn off your Philips Hue lights when you leave using IFTTT, and the process for vice versa is almost the same, so we recommend following this tutorial to set this recipe in IFTTT.
The only difference is that once you enter the geofence barrier you specify, you’ll choose to turn on your Philips Hue lights and then you’re ready to go.
Note that you can turn off the Philips Hue app or the IFTTT app completely and it will still use your location in the background for geofencing to work. It might cut down on battery life a bit, but it’s well worth it to add some magic to your Philips Hue lights.