The Nanoleaf Smart Ceiling Light Mimics a Skylight

One of my favorite smart finds of the last year was Nanoleaf smart light panels, which I called “light dopamine.” I’ve now got a home with Nanoleaf LEDs scattered around, filling the house with color, and I extended it to the outside over the holidays. With Nanoleaf’s latest offering, the Skylight ($249.99 for a set of three panels) they dive into hardwired products. Like all products that rely on smart technology, there are occasional hiccups, but overall, I’ve been incredibly pleased with the Skylight and I suspect it can fill a lighting void in your home. 

Expand your lighting beyond the hardwiring location

Nanoleaf has been teasing the Skylight since the second quarter of 2023, and I’ve been itching to try it. I had a hallway begging for more light, and I foresaw a string of Skylights straight down the center. I’ve had them installed for a few weeks, and they have illuminated the hallway enough that I can now see it’s time to paint the baseboards. Unlike the previous fixture, which illuminated one spot, the Skylight can expand well past the original fixture down the hallway, without additional wiring. Think about that for a second: If you have wiring in the center of your room's ceiling, your fixture is likely going to radiate light from that one spot. With the Skylight, you start at the spot of the wiring and expand outward. As smart lights, these can wake you up by gently coming on over a few minutes. I have set them to dim in the evening and only come on at 10% when I get up in the middle of the night. They also coordinate with the rest of my Nanoleaf lights for a subtle light theme that moves with whatever music I’m playing. As fixtures go, they’re pretty innocuous when off, but pack a punch when turned on. 

Low-profile lights

Each of the Skylight panels is just short of a 12x12 square. As they link together from any side, you mount them flush up against each other. While made of plastic, their matte finish looks dramatically more expensive. That said, I imagine the higher your ceilings, the better effect these will have. At a low height, they did feel like a throwback to fluorescent kitchen lights I grew up with. 

The Nanoleaf wall panels that come in many shapes and sizes have been hacked for years to work on the ceiling, and I can easily imagine that Nanoleaf might expand the Skylight into other shapes. Their website shows a number of configurations that show how the lights can be arranged more organically than my straight line to help dress the room. 

Each individual panel is 1400 lumens; the LEDs that make up that brightness are capable of 16 million RGBCW colors or any white from 2700-6500K, which encompass the entire cool and warm band. Nanoleaf says they’re good for 25,000 hours of use, which is on par with most LED fixtures. 

More installation steps required

Fair warning: Installation is a few ticks more complicated than your average fixture—but not more difficult. Nanoleaf has done a great job of providing clear video instruction, and after watching it once for the overview and then step-by-step during installation, I was successful on the first go. Installation of the first three panels took about 30 minutes. In addition to matching up the basic wiring in the ceiling, you have to disassemble the first panel and then install a base plate to the ceiling and do some wire configuration in the panel itself. While the panel is open, you install the mates in any configuration you want (the additional panels are a breeze), and then test and close them all up with the top panels. Pair them easily by just scanning the QR code on the instruction manual (a feature of Nanoleaf products that I love and works flawlessly each time). 

Nanoleaf color schemes are a vibe

Nanoleaf products integrate with all the major hubs: Google, Homekit, Alexa, SmartThings and worth mentioning: IFTTT (so you can do all kinds of integrations between Nanoleaf and brands that aren't in your hub of choice). Moreover, within Nanoleaf’s native app, you can group lights together in rooms and assign color schemes to an individual product or the whole room. These aren’t just light schemes that remain static; they move according to 10 or more motion schemes, or can move along to music. This isn't like a flashing marquee, but more the way a fireplace subtly shifts colors in an ombre pattern. That’s how Nanoleaf is different from other brands in the space like Govee. While you can set up a brighter color scheme, the calming ambers of “Date Night” or cloudy blues and grays of “Clouds” are built for chilling in your living room, dinner parties, working late night in the office or lying in bed reading. An entire shared library of schemes from other users are available, and you can DIY your own using tools that keep your choices looking professional. And you don’t have to set them to colors—you can simply set them to the white of your choosing.

Connectivity is still an issue

My main complaint about Nanoleaf products: They can go offline. The solution is usually just restarting the app. Restarting the app is a solution to getting the product back online in the Nanoleaf app, but not in Google Home, which is important if you want the lights to go on and off as part of an automation. With Nanoleaf making this leap to more integral parts of the home, not just ornamental lighting, this is a problem they’ll need to tackle.

My second complaint is that these lights are not Matter- or Threads-enabled, which makes little sense because as a company, Nanoleaf has been very Matter-forward. Within the Nanoleaf world,  there are two groups of products, those that work together with their 4D system—which includes most of the wall shapes—and then their Matter/Threads line, which don’t sync to 4D (the system that mirrors the colors on your TV and abstracts them around the room). In my opinion, the ability for all the lights to work together in sync is a feature Nanoleaf is missing out on.  

Bottom line: a delightful addition to the Nanoleaf lineup, with hopes for future upgrades

If I had the right room, I could imagine Skylights sprawling organically across the ceiling and playing the Pixies and Vivaldi on music sync.  If you think of these light panels as pixels, the more you have, the clearer a picture they paint. The cost of the first three is comparable with what you’d spend on a decent light fixture, but to get serious with a 12 pack, you’re in for almost $750. While I don't love the connectivity issues, Nanoleaf has always been proactive about updating their products, so I'm hopeful we'll see improvements.