There are two products both called smart lighting, separated by roughly a factor of twenty in price. Understanding which one you’re being quoted for is the whole game.
Option one: smart bulbs
Cost: £15–£50 per bulb, no installation.
A six-fitting room costs £90–£300 and works this afternoon. For a rented flat or a single room, this is a perfectly sensible purchase and we’d tell you to do it rather than call us.
The failure mode is predictable, and it’s the wall switch. Someone turns the light off at the wall — a guest, a cleaner, a child — and the bulb loses power. The app says unavailable. The voice assistant says it can’t reach the device. After the third time, everyone goes back to using the switch and the system is effectively abandoned.
The other cost is replacement. Ordinary LED lamps are a few pounds. Smart bulbs are £15–£50, and every one has electronics inside that will eventually fail.
Option two: wired lighting control
Cost: from £3,200 ex-VAT for one well-designed room. £8,000–£18,000 ex-VAT for a typical 3–4 bed house.
Here the intelligence sits in the consumer unit and the bulbs stay ordinary dimmable LEDs. The wall switches remain switches — they just do more. One press for the room at the right level, double press for a scene, long press to dim.
Nothing breaks when someone uses the wall, because using the wall is how it’s designed to work.
Where the money goes
On a whole-house system, roughly:
- Dimming modules and control hardware — 30–35%
- Control cable and containment — 15–20%
- Wall switches and panels — 10–15%
- Lighting design and circuit planning — 10%
- Installation labour — 20–25%
- Programming, scenes and commissioning — 10%
Note what’s small: the bulbs. Note what’s large: labour and cable. This is why the same system costs 30–40% less in a new build, where the cable goes in before plaster.
What actually makes lighting good
Not brightness. Layers.
A kitchen needs task light over the worktop, ambient light for the room, and something low and warm for eleven at night. Most houses have one bright ceiling pendant attempting all three and failing at each. Separating those into independently dimmed circuits is what transforms a room — and it’s a design decision made before any product is chosen.
The features people end up valuing most, in our experience:
- Corridors and bathrooms on presence detection at around 20% overnight, so nobody hunts for a switch at 3am
- A single “everything off downstairs” press by the front door
- Daylight-linked colour temperature, cool in the morning and warm after sunset
- Scenes, so one press does what four switches used to
The honest recommendation
Under about £3,000, buy good smart bulbs for one or two rooms. Don’t let anyone sell you a compromised whole-house system at that budget.
If you’re renovating or building, get the lighting circuits designed and cabled properly even if you install nothing else. Lighting is the one system where the wiring genuinely determines what’s possible later, and it’s the most expensive thing to change retrospectively.
If you want the whole house to work properly and you’ll be there long enough to enjoy it, wired control is what you’re actually after — and we’ll price it fixed after a free site visit.
Smart lighting installation → · Wired vs wireless, in detail →
Jack Jones
Director, Westgate Property Solutions · Loxone Silver Partner