The short version
- The wall switch must keep working. This is the rule that everything else bends around.
- Switches for whole rooms, bulbs where colour genuinely matters. Rarely both on the same circuit.
- Colour temperature matters more than colour. Warm at night is the change people actually feel.
- Neutral wiring decides your options. Check it before you choose anything.
The rule: the wall switch keeps working
A guest, a helper, a child or a parent must be able to walk into a room, press the switch, and have the light come on. If your lighting only works through an app, you have not built a smart home - you have built a system that everybody else in the house resents.
This single rule rules out the most common DIY setup: smart bulbs on a dumb switch. The moment somebody flips the wall switch off, the bulbs lose power, disappear from the system, and nothing works until someone flips it back. Every workaround for this - taping over the switch, removing it, telling people not to touch it - is an admission that the design was wrong.
Switches or bulbs?
Smart switches - the default
A smart switch replaces the wall plate and controls whatever is wired to it. The physical button keeps working, the room dims as a whole, the fitting can be anything, and you replace one device instead of eight bulbs. It needs a neutral wire at the switch box in most cases, and it needs an electrician.
This is what we fit in the great majority of rooms.
Smart bulbs - where colour earns its place
A smart bulb gives you per-bulb colour and colour temperature, which matters for feature lighting, a media room, a child's room, or a lamp that sets a mood. It needs constant power, which means the switch behind it must either be removed, replaced with a smart switch running in decoupled mode, or fitted with a smart button in its place.
Bulbs are excellent in the right two or three places and a poor default for a whole home.
Modules behind the plate
Where the switch plates are part of the interior design and cannot change, a relay or dimmer module fits behind the existing plate. The wall looks untouched and behaves normally; the intelligence is in the box.
Strips and cove lighting
Addressable LED strip in a cove, under a cabinet, along a staircase or behind a TV is the highest-impact and lowest-cost thing in the whole category. It needs a driver and a controller, and it needs planning for where the power comes from.
Getting the light right
The technical part is easy. The part people get wrong is the light itself.
Almost nobody wants a purple living room twice a year. Almost everybody wants warm light in the evening and neutral light in the morning. Tunable white is the feature that changes how a home feels.
Good fittings shift warmer as they dim. A light that goes to ten percent while staying at 4000K reads as dingy rather than cosy.
Cheap dimming often flickers or drops out below twenty percent, and some LED drivers hum. Test a sample in the actual fitting before committing to fifty of them.
Downlights, cove and a lamp on different circuits give you three scenes. One ceiling circuit gives you one.
Nobody adjusts brightness manually twice. Build four or five named scenes and let the automations pick them.
Lighting automations worth having
- Bathrooms and the yard on occupancy, with a timeout. This is the automation that pays for itself in arguments avoided.
- Circadian colour temperature - cooler through the day, warm after sunset, very dim and very warm after midnight.
- A night path: motion between bedroom and bathroom after 1am brings the floor lights up at five percent rather than blinding anyone.
- Stairs and corridors that light ahead of you and fade behind.
- One goodnight action that closes down every light in the house, so nobody walks the floors checking.
The neutral wire question
Most smart switches need a neutral at the switch box to power their own electronics. Many older Singapore flats route only the live to the switch. If yours does, your options are to pull neutral wires, to use no-neutral switches with capacitors at the fittings, or to move control to the bulb.
We recommend pulling neutral where the works allow it. No-neutral setups work, and they are measurably fussier - flicker with certain LED drivers, a narrower device list, and more edge cases. The full explanation is in what is neutral wiring.