I didn’t set out to build a smart home. I set out to stop arguing with my wife about whether the hallway light was left on. She insisted it was always me. I insisted it was sometimes her. The truth, as illuminated by the mounting electric bill, was that one of us — okay, probably me — was leaving lights on in empty rooms.

Smart bulbs seemed like an obvious solution: lights that turn themselves off. But the name brands cost $20 to $50 per bulb, and my house has a lot of light fixtures. Replacing all of them would cost hundreds of dollars, which felt absurd for the privilege of turning lights off remotely. I started looking at budget alternatives and found a four-pack of Wi-Fi smart bulbs from a brand called Kasa (TP-Link’s smart home line) for $24. That’s six dollars per bulb.

Setup was straightforward. I screwed in the bulbs, downloaded the app, and followed prompts that involved temporarily connecting to each bulb’s Wi-Fi signal to configure it for my home network. The process took about five minutes per bulb, and none of them required a separate hub — they connect directly to Wi-Fi, which was a major selling point for me. I’m not interested in buying a bridge device just to make light bulbs work.

The app is functional without being elegant. You can group bulbs into rooms, set schedules, create scenes, and adjust brightness and color temperature. The color temperature range goes from a warm 2500K (nice for evenings) to a cool 6500K (useful for task lighting). There’s also a full RGB color spectrum that I used exactly once to make the living room purple for my daughter’s birthday party and have never touched since.

The killer feature turned out to be scheduling. I programmed the hallway and bathroom lights to turn off automatically at 11 PM. The porch light comes on at sunset and turns off at sunrise. The bedroom lamps fade up gradually at 6:45 AM, which has replaced my jarring phone alarm and genuinely improved my mornings. None of this requires me to think about it anymore — the lights just do what they’re supposed to do.

Voice control through Alexa took an additional two minutes to set up and has become something I use more than I expected. “Alexa, turn off all the lights” as I’m getting into bed is a small luxury that I appreciate every night. “Alexa, dim the living room to 30 percent” for movie watching is similarly satisfying. I initially thought voice control was a gimmick, but the friction reduction of not having to walk to a switch adds up over time.

The downsides are worth mentioning. These bulbs require a constant Wi-Fi connection — if your router goes down, they become ordinary bulbs that only respond to the physical switch. If someone turns off the wall switch, the bulb loses power and can’t be controlled until the switch is turned back on, which creates occasional confusion. And the Kasa app, while functional, sends more promotional notifications than I’d like, though these can be disabled in settings.

After a year of use, all eight bulbs are still working without any failures. The energy savings are modest — LED bulbs are already efficient, so the smart features don’t dramatically change consumption — but the convenience and the end of the “who left the light on” debate have been worth far more than the $48 I spent. For anyone curious about smart home technology, budget smart bulbs are the perfect low-risk entry point.