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How to Turn Off Philips Hue Lights When You Leave

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While you can have your Philips Hue lights turn on and off at set times during the day, here’s how to have your Philips Hue lights turn off automatically whenever you leave the house, no matter what time it is.

While Philips Hue lights are great for turning on and off remotely using your smartphone, they’re actually capable of so much more. You can set alarms and timers, as well as create all sorts of different “recipes” using IFTTT.

However, what you might not know is that you can have your Philips Hue lights turn off automatically whenever you leave the house, essentially never having to worry about whether or not you left some lights on.

Read: Philips Hue Review

There are a couple of ways you can set this up, but both ways involve using geofencing, which is a fancy term for having a virtual barrier of sorts, and whenever you leave or enter this barrier, then a certain action will take effect.

In this case, whenever your smartphone’s GPS detects that you stepped out of a pre-determined barrier, then your Philips Hue lights will shut off.

Here’s how to set it up and have your Philips Hue lights automatically turn off when you leave the house.

Turn Off Philips Hue Lights When You Leave

Perhaps the best method for having your lights turn off when you leave is using the official Philips Hue app, which has a geofencing feature built in.

To set this up, simply open the Philips Hue app and tap on the Menu button in the top-left corner. From there, tap on Geofencing.

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Next, you’ll be shown two options: Arriving and Leaving. Tap on Leaving, which will then bring up a map, showing a pin for your current location, so make sure that you’re home when you do set this up.

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At the bottom, tap on Lights and then place a checkmark next to each light that you want to turn off. If you want all lights to turn off, then tap on Select All toward the top-right corner. After that, tap on the arrow icon in the top-left corner to go back.

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Tap Save in the top-right corner to officially enable geofencing and have your lights automatically turn off when you leave. From here on out, whenever the app detects that you leave your house, your Philips Hue lights will automatically shut off.

The only downside is that there isn’t any way to adjust the geofencing barrier, so if you want more precise control over how far away you must be from your house in order for the lights to turn off, I recommend using IFTTT.

Using IFTTT

If you want finer control over the geofencing barrier, IFTTT is likely the best option for this. We’ve covered how to use IFTTT before, as well as how to use it with your Philips Hue lights, but here’s how to set it up so that your lights turn off automatically when you leave a particular area.

First off, you’ll want to download the IFTTT app for your smartphone. Then open it up and tap on the mortar-and-pestle icon in the top-right corner.

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From there, tap on the + icon and then tap on Create Recipe at the bottom on the next screen.

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After that, find either iOS Location or Android Location (depending on what device you’re using, of course), and then select the You exit an area trigger.

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After that, you’ll then customize the geofence barrier by zooming in and out and moving the circle to create your own barrier of sorts, so if you want your lights to turn off when you’re further away from home than just being down the street, this is how you can customize that.

Once you’re happy with your geofence, tap Next and then locate the Philips Hue channel. On the next screen, select Turn off lights and then choose which lights you want turned off.

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On the next screen, hit Finish to create your IFTTT recipe.

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Keep in mind that you can have either the Philips Hue app or the IFTTT app completely closed and it will still use your location in the background.

3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Shelbytashby

    02/11/2016 at 9:19 am

    hmmm

  2. Shelbytashby

    02/11/2016 at 9:23 am

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  3. Kellen

    08/16/2016 at 10:03 am

    What if more than one person lives in the house? If you don’t both leave, wouldn’t that leave the person still inside in the dark?!

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