Bloody Brilliant – episode 4

Motion sensor lights

I can’t deny – I’m totally into home automation. It probably helps that I’m married to a geek, but I still think it would excite me regardless. Thanks to Bye Bye Standby we have a number of things in our house working more efficiently. For instance, during the holidays I’m able to turn all my Christmas lights on and off throughout the entire house with the push of a single button. And a different button will turn on/off my TV, DVD player, Wii, etc so that they don’t stay on standby when not in use. A third button turns on/off some intimate task lighting throughout the house – which serves as great low-level lighting late at night.

However, of all of these my absolute favourite is our motion sensor light in the utility room. The light switch isn’t in the most convenient place and our hands are usually so full of washing baskets or recycling that we couldn’t click it anyway. Now, when you walk in the room a lamp clicks on and stays on while you’re in there and shuts off two minutes after it stops detecting motion. It’s the perfect amount of light to do what we need to do but if we ever need super-bright lighting we can switch on the four-bulb main light as well. It doesn’t sound glamorous or exciting, but honestly – Andrew and I absolutely love it. If you have any space that is creepy or you just want lit up before you’re even fully in the room (a basement, for instance) it’s a perfect solution. Bye Bye Standby have a model that you can wire into a main lights, but we decided that to be greener we’d rather just have one bulb (in the lamp) come on and off automatically and we can use the four-bulb overhead light as needed.

As always, these opinions are my own and I didn’t get any compensation or samples as part of the review.  I just think they’re bloody brilliant and want you to know!  However, if the company wants to send me some stuff because of all the amazing free publicity I’ve just given them, they’re more than welcome to!!