You possibly can select for the lamp to comply with the pure dawn and sundown instances primarily based in your location, which in a lot of the world modifications a bit of daily. Or you may set customized instances within the app. I did not need the lamp’s sundown truly to start at 7:30 pm day by day, so I set my sundown to 9:30 pm. As night time fell every day, the lamp would slowly cut back its blue mild, simply as a traditional sundown does. It indicators your physique to start out winding down and readying for sleep.
It’s also possible to set how steadily the lights fade out and in, respectively—as much as an hour—and the brightness and temperature of the sunshine. The lamp will be linked to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant if you would like to combine it into your sensible house, but it surely is not required.
I did have some points. Generally the sunshine routine bought caught after I plugged within the lamp or turned it on, and I needed to toggle one of many 4 “schedule override” settings on and off to get the lamp to enter its preprogrammed routine. These overrides allow you to set the sunshine for a selected activity, together with sleeping, studying, enjoyable, and dealing.
Utilizing it outdoors your bed room can also be odd. Assuming you do not reside in a dorm room or a studio house, you will have to hold the Skyview 2 into your bed room every night time and plug it right into a wall in order that the dawn perform wakes you up within the morning. It will not do you any good if it is going by way of its dawn routine in another a part of the home the place you are not sleeping. However then you definitely’ll have to select it up and transfer it into one other room—an workplace, the lounge, or wherever you spend a lot of your day—to learn from its all-day light-shifting sample and sundown routine. If you end up aggravated or slowed down by small duties like that, it is one thing to remember.
The lamp itself is constructed nicely. The broad, metallic base prevents it from tipping over from something lower than an excellent whack, and the sunshine enclosure is so thick you may most likely knock down bowling pins with it. The lens is frosted sufficient that I may look proper at it with out blinding myself. It additionally stayed cool to the contact, irrespective of how lengthy it’d been on 100% brightness.
So, Did It Gentle Up My Life?
I loved the impact all through the day. It is tough to say if I am experiencing a placebo impact or the sunshine actually helps, however emotionally, it was good to have a bit of sunshine selection all through my day between sun-up and sunset.
Cooping your self up indoors all day below the identical taste of unchanging mild from daybreak to nightfall is bizarre and unnatural. For folk in a room with out a window, the Skyview 2 may very well be a godsend.
However at $449, it is a dear godsend. A Philips Hue A19 White Ambiance Smart Light Bulb costs $26 and you’ll screw it into any lamp and program it through the intuitive Hue app to imitate dawn routines, sundown routines, and the shifting mild by way of the day. And you should purchase multiple of them. For this form of cash, the Skyview 2 ought to do extra. For instance, if it had been shiny sufficient to negate the necessity for different lamps in my front room, then I would have a barely simpler time justifying the value.
You pay a premium for the Skyview 2. Does it work? Sure. You possibly can create the same impact with sensible bulbs. However for a plug-and-go answer, it positive was a novel approach of pretending that I lived in a shiny and sunny house, if solely till my time with the Skyview 2 got here to an finish.