I recently purchased a few smart bulbs and have plans to expand my collection of smart lights. I did notice a small inconvenience during setup, however: It was hard to tell which bulb was which without staring into an app. So I added a visual aid to my bulbs using emoji stickers. It’s a lot easier to see the “banana” light is out instead of trying to figure out which bulb is “Hue living room bulb 7” while your ceiling fan is off.
Image credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty
Get Some Stickers
You’ll need some stickers, of course. You can get a 288-pack of emoji stickers from City Beach, or a bigger pack from Emoji Stickers. They’re minuscule, only a centimetre or so in diameter, so it won’t adversely affect the bulb. If you have your bulbs inside fixtures such as lampshades or sconces, you won’t even see them until you need to.
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Since the smart bulbs are LEDs, and don’t get as hot as traditional bulbs, you don’t have to worry about the stickers melting or peeling off.
Image credit: Amazon
Use Similar Emoji as Visual Aids
You definitely have more than a few lights in each room, so to make things easy, assign rooms emoji categories. I designated fruit emoji for my living room, and smiley face emoji for my office. No doubt you can use corresponding home-related emoji for the rest, or separate them by colour.
It makes it easier if you ever have to move as well. You can leave your bulb settings as they were without having to reassign or rearrange them because you forgot which bulb went where.
Assign Emoji in The App
After you pick some stickers and apply them to your smart bulb, you’ll have to rename them accordingly. In the Philips Hue app, you can simply prepend the bulb name with the corresponding emoji.
Even if you don’t have a ton of smart gear, classifying them with this emoji shorthand makes it easier to manage the gear you’ll add in the future.
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