I’ve spent a long time trying to replace the kitchen lights with smart bulbs. The problem is that in the kitchen I don’t have a normal lamp, I imagine that’s the same thing that happens to most of you, to the 11 people who read me, but instead I have the famous downlights that light up the kitchen like it’s a football pitch when they’re on… and, obviously, they use as much power as the football pitch. My downlights had 26W gd24d bulbs… x6!! that’s 156W on top of whatever the transformers were consuming… so just imagine the energy consumption (this has been the excuse I used at home to change them) and the environmental footprint! (this one too). On top of that, there was hardly a month when one of the bulbs didn’t burn out. I don’t know what the hell was wrong with them but they didn’t last at all. I also tried low-energy bulbs and then LED bulbs, but same result: they kept burning out every so often… and on top of that the LEDs ‘died badly’ and would flicker or half the bulb would just go out… a real pain. I spent a while looking for HomeKit-compatible downlights but they don’t exist yet… I also thought about installing those LED downlights that don’t use a separate bulb, they just light up as a whole unit, and the idea is you remove the original and pop these in ‘plug’n’play’ style, so I could control them with a Shelly. This was going to be my chosen solution until I found… ta-daaaaa:

gd24-d to e27 adapters

Yesssssss!! I found these super cheap adapters on Amazon, and super, super Chinese (in fact, they’re so Chinese that some of them arrived with bent pins, so I bought 2 boxes of 4 for my 6 bulbs), that slot into the gd24d socket just like a bulb would, but have an e27 thread, so you can fit any bulb you want. Installation is basically nonexistent, you just have to remove the original bulb and pop in the e27 bulb + adapter combo. You don’t even need to remove the original transformer, although it’s better if you do, since you’ll save a bit more on energy consumption. This way, not only did I get rid of the burnt-out bulb problem, but also if you install a smart bulb along with a Shelly or a smart switch you can do a lot more things… can you guess what I did? I could go for the cheap solution or the super expensive one… well, guess: That’s right, Philips Hue Ambiance e27 bulbs, 8W, that let you change the warmth of the light depending on the time of day, plus an Aqara smart switch.

Automations and Shortcuts

On top of that, I’ve been able to automate several things that I couldn’t before and that I wouldn’t have been able to do with a non-smart downlight even if it never burned out: – When the last person leaves the house, the kitchen lights turn off automatically: it hadn’t happened to us that often that we left the lights on since the kitchen is right next to the entrance… but now I don’t even have to reach out to flip the switch! This saves me my own personal energy, since I get to keep my hands in my pockets xD – If someone turns on the kitchen light at night only 3 of the 6 bulbs turn on: I couldn’t have done this if it weren’t ‘smart’. I could have used 3 Shellys, set the switch one to ‘detached’ mode, and used the virtual device to create a rule for nighttime and another for daytime… but this way was way simpler. – If someone leaves the kitchen light on, it turns itself off after 10 minutes: for this it factors in the motion sensor located right at the kitchen entrance. If the sensor detects someone and the light is off, it turns on by itself. If the sensor detects someone and the light is on, it turns off by itself after 10 minutes. – I could have set up the motion sensor to turn on the kitchen light if someone walks by at night… but can you imagine it turning on in the middle of the night, and then I get up in the morning and it’s on? What a creepy feeling, I’d have to go check the cameras to see if someone had walked by… and another creepy thought, wondering if any moment now the typical little girl in a nightgown with really long hair staring straight at the camera is going to show up… All of this happens more or less automatically, but of course you can also turn on the light from your phone (whichever bulb you want, or the whole kitchen), ask Siri to turn on the kitchen lights, or just flip the wall switch (yes, like in the last century, I don’t know who could possibly like that!). I’ve calculated that with what I’ll save on electricity by cutting from 26W per bulb down to 8W per bulb, the price per kWh, and what the bulbs and the Aqara switch cost me, in about 47 years I’ll have paid off the whole installation. Take that, household economics!