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How to Turn On Philips Hue Lights When You Get Home

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While you can have your Philips Hue lights turn on automatically at a certain time, here’s how to turn on Philips Hue lights automatically whenever you get home, no matter the time of day or night.

Philips Hue lights are essentially smart connected lights that allow you to turn them on and off wirelessly from your smartphone, but they can do so much more than that.

The official Philips Hue app allows you to set alarms and timers for your lights, as well as enable a feature called geofencing, which allows you to have your lights automatically turn on when you get home, or turn off whenever you leave.

Read: Philips Hue Review

Something like this can be great if you simply forgot to turn off a light in your house and don’t want it staying on all day, or if you truly don’t want to bother with light switches and want it all automated.

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Of course, some people want to leave some lights on when they’re away from home, like if they go on vacation and don’t want anyone snooping around and getting any ideas, but if you’re leaving for work for the day, enabling geofencing allows you to forget about light switches completely, and have your lights automatically turn on when you get home that day.

Read: The Best Smart Home Products

If this is something that interests you, then here’s how to turn on Philips Hue lights when you get home, all of which is done automatically.

Turning on Philips Hue Lights When You Get Home

There are a couple of methods for doing this, but perhaps the easiest method is using the official Philips Hue app.

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

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

At the bottom, tap on Scene and then select the scene that you want enabled and turned on when you get home. You may have to create a unique scene if you want specific lights to turn on, but you also may already have one made.

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You can choose to have your lights only turn on automatically when you get home if it’s after sunset. After you decide, tap Save in the top-right corner to finish the setup and enable geofencing, which will then have your lights automatically turn on when you arrive home.

The only downside with this method is that there isn’t any way to adjust the geofencing barrier, so if you want more precise control over how close you must be to your house before your lights turn on, then I recommend using IFTTT, which has a better interface for this, specifically.

Using IFTTT

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 on automatically when you get home.

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We detailed a similar process before on how to have your Philips Hue lights turn off automatically when you leave using IFTTT, and the process for the opposite is almost identical, so we suggest following that tutorial to set up that recipe in IFTTT.

The only difference is that you’ll select to turn on your Philips Hue lights when you enter into the geofencing barrier that you specify, and then you’ll be good to go.

Keep in mind that you can have either the Philips Hue app or the IFTTT app completely closed out and it will still use your location in the background for the geofencing to work. It may reduce battery life a bit, but it’s worth it in order to add a little magic to your Philips Hue lights.

2 Comments

2 Comments

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