How to Group Lights on Google Home: The Complete Guide

Smart lighting has revolutionized our home lives, making us more comfortable by being able to adjust light bulbs throughout our household without having to get out of bed. The best Google Home-compatible devices provide security, entertainment and more. But with these new conveniences comes a new set of frustrations. Wandering around in the dark while navigating the Google Home app looking for the lights you need among a sea of ​​switches for various smart home devices is once again starting to seem like a Sisyphean task. User One Threads humorously summed up the situation perfectly:

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However, after a few minutes of setup, you can greatly increase the convenience of smart home lighting by grouping your lights. This will allow you to turn on all the lights in your living room at the same time or turn off all the lights on the ground floor when you go to the bedroom in the evening.

There are several ways to group your lights in Google Home. The easiest way is to group the lights by room – this is how Home organizes the lighting by default. The frustrating thing is that if you want to group more specifically, Home doesn’t make it easy. But don’t give up yet. By using the step-by-step techniques in this guide, you’ll be able to tailor your smart lighting to your heart’s content. Without further ado, here’s how to group lights on Google Home.

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The easiest way to group your lights in Google Home is by room. You will be asked about this every time you add a new one. When you add a light to your home, you’ll be asked to add it to a room and create a room if it’s the first smart home device assigned to that room. This will allow you to simultaneously control the lighting in your room using the Google Home app or command your Nest speakers to “turn the living room lights on/off,” for example.

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You can see your devices grouped by room in the Devices tab in the Google Home app. To group lights in an existing room, follow these steps:

1. Open the Google Home app and click Devices.
2. Hold the light you want to group until the light control panel opens, then select the gear icon in the upper right corner to go to its settings.
3. Click Room.
4. Select one of the existing rooms by tapping the appropriate one.
5. Click Save. The light will now be assigned to this room.

If the smart light isn’t already part of the room, you can follow the same steps to create a new room for it. Once you go to the light settings page and tap Room, scroll down to create a new room. You can choose from options like “Office” and “Master Bedroom” or scroll to the bottom of the list to create a room with a custom name. Click Save when you’re done. The lamp will now be assigned as the first smart device in the newly created room.

Once you’ve organized all your smart lights by room, there are a few reasons why you might want to create custom groups beyond the ones you use by default in your home. Maybe you have a lot of lights in one room, but you usually only use a few of them. For example, choose a few lights in the living room that you want to leave on while watching your home theater. Another common use case is a light fixture with multiple bulbs where you want to control all of them at once rather than tediously switching them one by one.

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Frustratingly, there’s no Google Home feature that allows you to group subgroups of smart lights in a room. Instead, you must give almost identical names to each light in the group of lights you want to control. For example, if you have a three-bulb lamp in your bedroom, you could give it names like “Three Bulb 1”, “Three Bulb 2”, and “Three Bulb 3”. Then, when you want to control them as a group, you say, “Turn on the three-bulb lights.” To rename a light, hold it until the controls open, then tap the Settings icon in the top right corner. Tap Name, enter a new name, then tap Save.

Another method is to create fake rooms in your Google Home home. You can assign each bulb in the three-bulb lamp from our previous example to a custom room called a “Three-Bulb Lamp” by following the steps in the above section of this article. However, since Google Home will then treat it as its own room, this option eliminates the ability to control these lights in a larger group with other lights in the bedroom.

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As mentioned above, Google Home frustratingly doesn’t allow you to create indoor lighting subgroups (an omission made even more puzzling by the fact that you can easily create custom smart speaker groups). However, in addition to the somewhat clumsy workarounds mentioned in the previous section of this article, you can create a Google Assistant routine that mimics grouping lights. Here’s how:

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1. Open the Google Home app, tap the Routines tab, then tap Add.
2. Select Household.
3. Name the routine. What you call it doesn’t matter.
4. Select “When I tell Google Assistant.”
5. Create a trigger phrase for the procedure. For example, “Turn on the lights on the ground floor.” You can create multiple phrases to cover different ways of speaking naturally. Click Add Starter when you’re happy with your phrase.
6. Click Add action.
7. Click Customize Home Devices.
8. Click on each light you want to add to your routine, then select “Turn On or Off.”
9. Select “Enable” and then click Add action.
10. Repeat steps 6-9 for each light you want to group.
11. Once all the lights you want to group are part of your routine, click Save. This will be your group inclusion routine.
12. Repeat this process again, this time creating new trigger phrases such as “Turn off the lights downstairs” and selecting “Turn off” for each light added in the procedure. When you’re done, save the second procedure. This will be your group deactivation routine.

From now on, when you say “Hey Google” to your Nest speakers or summon the Google Assistant on your phone, say one of the trigger phrases to activate these custom routines. While not as convenient as being able to group lights, routines are a solid workaround.