Every year at Christmas, we strung a garland up our staircase that included tiny white lights. It’s one of my favorite things we do in decorating. That makes me feel like the magical season is upon us. Steve put them on a smart switch so they’d turn off after we went to bed.
The other thing I noticed a few years ago was that I really liked being able to walk up and down the stairs without turning on the stairwell lights. We had all of the light switches in the house changed over to the paddle kind so I can flip them on and off with my elbow when I’m carrying things, but there’s just something that delights me about having my path automatically lit as I walk up or down the stairs.
Steve is also very courteous and leaves the landing stairwell in dimmed mode when he goes to bed so that when he gets up earlier than me, he can have enough light to navigate without waking me up, but then he has to remember to change the dimmer (only at one end of the landing) during the day.
My studio is at the corner of an L where the light switches for the landing at the top of the stairs are at the ends of the L. That means if I walk out of my studio in the evening, I have to walk half a landing in the dark to get to a light switch. I’m a smidge clumsy and not getting any younger, so this feels a bit risky. Adding to the risk is that two of our three pets are the same color as the carpeting!
We bought a wall-powered motion sensor for the top of the landing, but the only outlet is about 75% of the way across the landing before I trigger the motion sensor.
Over the last few years, I’ve been trolling for motion sensor lights to solve these problems. Then, a few weeks ago, we were visiting our son, Kyle, and noticed that he had battery-powered motion sensors on his stairwell! I grilled him on the specifics and immediately bought some for us when we got home.
The lights Kyle recommended are the Lyridz Rechargeable Battery Night Lights that are currently priced at $17 for a pair on Amazon. Lyridz has several different options for motion sensor lights of different sizes and capabilities. The ones I chose are 3″ x 1.6″ stadium-shaped, and they’re USB-C rechargeable. Be careful; they sell Micro USB versions too, and you don’t want those!
The Lyridz night lights come in three colors: warm white, cool white, and amber. I wanted to consider cool white, but Steve and Kyle talked me out of it. For a stairwell, warm white is probably better, but if you wanted these under the counters in the kitchen, you might consider cool white. The amber didn’t appeal to me at all.
Since these lights don’t require external power, you can place them anywhere you like. They attach magnetically to a small piece of steel you stick to the wall with the included sticky-back tape. Our wall surface is pretty fragile, so we chose to use 3M double-backed tape instead. I don’t know that the Lyridz tape would wreck it, but I can show you the damage on my studio wall where I trusted Nanoleaf’s sticky tape.
Kyle says the lights last around a month, and since they’re magnetically attached to the wall, you just pop them off, plug in a USB-C cable, and charge them up. Easy peasy.
Each light has a switch with three positions: on, off, and auto. In auto mode, the light only activates when ambient brightness is below 10 LUX. This is a great design choice, because why have them come on when it’s already bright enough to see? The tech specs say the lights also shut off after 20 seconds of inactivity, but I think that varies by light. One of the lights turned off after 6 seconds, which wasn’t a problem at all, but some seem to stay on longer after inactivity.
Each light also has a round, textured area; I guess I’ll call it a button, but it doesn’t depress. This button, when tapped, will cycle through 5 brightness levels. Or you can hold your finger on it, which gives you 1-20 lm stepless dimming.
Choosing placement was a fun exercise, especially with two minor league OCD engineers involved. Where our stairwell meets the white stucco wall, there’s a diagonal wood molding area. So do you mount the lights parallel to the diagonal, or parallel to the horizontal stairs? And do you mount on the wood where the tape is least likely to damage the surface, or live wildly and put them on the wall above the wood?
After testing mounting the lights using blue painter’s tape, we decided to go above the wood because a greater area of the steps was illuminated by going higher, and we went with parallel to the diagonal wood.
With that critical decision made, there was more OCD to deal with. Our stairwell wraps around, so it has 5 steps up to the first landing, 5 to the second landing, and then 5 more steps to the top landing. You see the problem, right? 5 steps and one light. They simply cannot be placed halfway up to each landing unless we wanted them to be mid-step, which broke our brains. We centered them above the 3rd step up, but now I’m having second thoughts that we could have centered them on the length of the diagonal…
We bought enough to put one on each landing too, and while the wood molding was politely horizontal, the diagonal started before the end of the landing. So do we place them centered on the horizontal wood, or centered on the landing? There was much discussion; pull-out rules were deployed, placements evaluated, and we decided centered on the landing was the least disturbing.
I bought 6 lights total, 2 for each landing, and 1 on each diagonal, leaving 1 for the scary top landing with carpet-colored cats and dogs waiting to trip me. We chose the door jamb opposite my studio door, and now when I step out of my room, I instantly have enough light to make it across to the landing without dying. Once I survive the first three feet or so, the powered nightlight detects my motion, and from there each light on the stairs comes on gently as I descend, as the princess I am.
Bottom Line
The bottom line is that the Lyridz nightlights are bright enough to throw just enough light, detect motion quite quickly, magnetically attach to the wall for easy USB-C charging, and they’re very inexpensive.
These are not the only lights Lyridz sell. I put a link in the shownotes to the Lyridz store on Amazon so you can peruse all of their offerings.