Ring Smart Lighting System Introduction & Overview

An introduction to the Ring Lighting System and overview how it integrates into the rest of the Ring system.

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Steve Siems
Jan 13, 2021
Icon Time To Read8 min read

Ring has come out with a lot of new smart wireless lighting, and in today's video, we're going over the Ring Smart Lighting System and how Ring’s lighting integrates into the rest of its system, so stay tuned.

Today, we're looking at Ring and all of their new smart lighting. The great thing about all of this lighting is that it is wireless. So, it will either run off of solar power or batteries.

And the one key feature of this Ring Smart Lighting is that you do need the Ring Bridge for everything to connect to. Now, with this device, you can connect up to 50 devices, which will connect it all to the Ring App.

From there, you can link all your devices together, your path lights with your light bulb and your cameras and motion sensors, but we'll be getting to all of that a little bit later.

Ring’s new smart lights are smart

One thing that I want to mention is that Ring has other lighting options built into its cameras. So, they've got the Ring Floodlight Cam and the Ring Spotlight Camera, but recently, they came out with their new smart lighting products, which are not going to be integrated with their cameras at all.

Instead, these Ring Smart Lights will be standalone lights that will either be battery-powered or solar-powered. The cool thing about all these products, except for the light bulb, is that they all have motion sensors built into them.

So instead of these lights being on constantly, draining power, they're only gonna be activated when something trips that motion sensor. And a cool thing about these lights having these motion sensors built into them, connecting to the bridge, connecting all of the ecosystems together is that if you have other devices, other lights, other cameras when the initial motion sensor detects something, it's gonna be able to trigger other things in your Ring ecosystem.

So, for example, if you have the Ring Path Lights out far in front of your house, when those trigger on, it can trigger your Ring Video Doorbell or your Ring Stick-Up Cam to start recording earlier than it normally would.

This way, you can get whatever action is happening before the person gets to the door. Now, if you don't wanna go crazy with buying multiple path lights or getting a spotlight.

Just want a simple light bulb for a porch light and, say, maybe your Ring Video Doorbell, you can buy a standalone motion sensor to stick out further in your yard to pick up motion to turn on that porch light and your Ring Video Doorbell to start recording a little bit earlier.

So you don't have to go crazy with all of this stuff. They do have just the basics to get you started, and then you can add on top of that in the future.

A tour of the Ring app

So, now that we've gone over some of these devices' features let's look at the app and see what it offers. So, I would have to say Ring is probably one of my favorite apps out of all of the security apps out there.

The Ring App just flows really well. It's got everything you need, and between doing all the individual videos for these devices right here to doing this video right now, they've made an update.

At the top of the screen of the Ring App, we've got this new dashboard. So I see things like neighbors, history, lights, so that's what we're gonna be doing. But then they've got all these other actions.

If you go to edit at the end, you can then change the positioning of these. So, say I want lights in the front. Now, when we return to the top, we’ve got lights at the front of the dashboard.

Let's tap on the lights and take a look. These are all of the devices that I have set up and we have it divided into two groups. I've got a front yard and a backyard group. So, if I want, I can control all the lighting in that group.

For the front yard, I'm gonna tap on the light in the Ring App, and it will turn on all the lights I have on in the front yard. I can see they have them all on right there. And then I can tap it again, and that's going to turn all the lights off. So, I can control every light in that group from just that group in the Ring App.

But if I want, I can scroll down and then just do each light individually. So, if I want the spotlight on, I can just turn on the spotlight in the backyard or just turn it off from the Ring App.

I'm gonna go ahead and tap on the front yard group. We could see all of the devices that I have in there. We've got the two path lights and the porch light.

Ring app alerts

Up in the top right, I can toggle the lights to turn on and off from there. And then I can also turn off the motion alerts.

Now, these are just gonna be the alerts that are going to be coming through on the phone. This is not going to turn off the motion detection. If we go into settings, this is gonna be settings for the front yard group.

Ring app general settings, motion settings, and schedules

We've got general settings here, and this is how we will either change the name of the front yard group or edit what devices are in that group. So, if we click on edit group, we can turn on and off what devices are gonna be in that front yard group. We're gonna back out of there.

We can also go to motion settings. So, motion settings are going to be which devices do I want to turn on the motion detection for? If I have a path light that is too close to a street or a walkway, and it's triggering too much, I can turn off the motion sensor to that and say I have the second light that actually has its motion sensor turned on.

And then we've got motion schedules down here. So, this is going to be for your motion alerts. So, if you don't want notifications during a certain time of the day, you can turn it on in that motion schedule.

We've also got motion snooze. So, if you're getting too many notifications, you can turn it off. If we've got people in the backyard and we're having a little party, and I'm constantly getting notified of lights detecting motion, I can snooze it for two hours all the way up to four hours.

Ring app light settings and auto shut off

Next, we've got light settings. So this is going to be the auto shut off times. So once it detects motion and turns on the lights, how long do we want those lights on for? You can go from anywhere from 30 seconds all the way up to five minutes of the lights being on.

We've got shared users. So you can share this with other Ring users and then we've got the light schedule. So this is going to be when you want these lights to be activated.

For me, I set it up for the path lights and then I've also got the front yard light, that's gonna be the light bulb. That's the porch light. And I have them being activated seven days a week from dusk till dawn.

I'm gonna tap on it to edit it. And let's say that I want the lights to turn off at midnight instead of at dawn. So I'm gonna go in here, go into a custom time and then down here, 12:00 AM is when I want the lights to stop turning on.

And then if I want to not have it happen on the weekends, I can do that too and then we're gonna click on save and save changes. And that is going to set that up for me. Have the changes saved, so we can back out of there, and now we see the new updated changes for that schedule.

Ring app individual smart light settings

So those are the settings for the front yard group, but if you want, you can change individual settings per light. And, in fact, you'll get different options for different lights.

So, if we take a look at the Ring Path Light 2, when I tap on that, I now have a brightness level at the top so I can adjust how bright I want that light to be.

We've got event history. So if I tap on that, it's gonna show me everything that this light has been doing, when it's turning on, when it's turning off, detecting motion in addition to light settings, motion settings, linked devices.

So I can link this with other devices. We've got the peephole door cam here, and we've also got the Ring Stick-Up Cam so we can connect it to those devices.

And then we've got the general settings. So, these are the settings that we took a look at before.

Now, if we back out of here and go to just the light bulb in the front and the light bulb will have different settings, it won't have as much 'cause it doesn't have a sensor built into it. One thing that we don't have here is linked devices.

So if you want to link your porch light up to a motion sensor or a camera or a Ring Video Doorbell, you're gonna have to go into the Ring Video Doorbell settings or the camera settings. Then, from there, you're going to link a device, and the device you will select is the porch light that will turn on when it detects somebody walking up to the door.

Ring Smart Light tests

Alright, now that we've gone through the settings in the app, let's go ahead and look at some demos of what these lights can do.

Alright, so the camera's gonna be all about placement. I just tucked mine right down here on the window sill just to give a demo of when it detects motion, it's gonna turn on the light above it.

If we walk in front of it, we can see the light is now blue on there, and the light is already on. So we've already got the porch light on, turned on it that quickly by motion detection from the camera that was shooting at the path walking up to my house.

I am testing the path lights, and I have it linked up to the porch light. So, as the path lights turn on, you'll notice that that porch light turns on, too. This will show you how quickly the lights turn on after one is activated.

Alright, so we've got the light set up over here on this side and our motion sensors. We're gonna go ahead and start testing out the light right now. If I just walk up to the light, let's see how fast it takes it to turn on.

There we go, it is now turned on and there was a slight delay with that, it almost took me getting up to the lights but here is an idea of what it looks like and how much light it is casting out here right now. So pretty good.

If we go a bit wide-scale here, you can see how bright it actually gets. But now that we've seen how bright this light gets let's test it out using the motion sensor.

So I set up the camera in the corner of the yard. I'm walking in the side gate here, tripping that motion sensor over by the gate, and you see how fast that light turns on. Having the light turn on with a motion sensor that is farther away or around a corner is ideal.

Ring has built a pretty cool ecosystem with its cameras, lighting, and all the other devices it sells.

Ring Smart Light test results

After testing these lights for a few weeks, I'm impressed with them. I am impressed that they provide wireless lighting through either battery power or solar panels, which will connect to their cameras.

I feel like one of the biggest problems with Ring cameras, or my biggest problem, is that my recording started too late. So this is kind of a cool way around that to where I can have different lights that wirelessly trigger my cameras early.

So the delayed record time that I was having is not a problem anymore. But what do you guys think about these lightings and the feature and the Ring ecosystem?

Steve Siems
Written by
Steve is a social media influencer and an overall Smart Home enthusiast. He loves to geek out with all things tech, and is quickly becoming one of the industries leading voices. When he's not in front of the camera, Steve is researching the next greatest Smart Home accessory or playing with his 2 little girls in sunny So Cal.

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