How to Turn Off the Bedside Lamp Without Getting Out of Bed

The switch on a bedside lamp is never where your hand is. It's on the cord somewhere behind the nightstand, or on the base past the glass of water, and getting to it means a twist across your sore side or a lean out over the edge of the mattress.

On an ordinary night you don't notice. Home from surgery with a drain pinned to your shirt, you notice every time.

Somebody in r/breastcancer wrote up what their recovery needed that the usual lists leave out. The bedroom part has a line about the lamp: a remote wireless wall switch for the lamp on the nightstand, so turning it on in the middle of the night was easy.

Two replies had done the same, and both had fished theirs out of the box of Christmas decorations. One says it was the best. The other describes the evening it gives you back:

I could get myself all cozy in bed, read a bit, check my phone, and then not have to reach at all to turn off the lamp on my nightstand.

u/Glad_Tomatillo_6391, in r/breastcancer

If you're home from surgery, in a sling, or your shoulder, side or back won't let you twist to the nightstand, this is a cheap fix. The plain kind, a button and nothing else, is still the right one for the job, and the one to get is the BN-LINK wall-switch remote kit.

How do you make a lamp remote controlled?

The kit is two pieces. A small box plugs into the wall socket and the lamp plugs into the box. The remote is a switch that's wired to nothing: it talks to the box by radio, and the box passes or cuts the power to the lamp.

Leave the lamp's own switch on, and from then on the remote is the switch. There's no app, no account and no Wi-Fi password to type in, so the whole setup is plugging two things in and pressing a button.

The remote in the BN-LINK kit is shaped like a light switch, a flat plate with on and off buttons that sticks to a wall or a headboard, or lies loose on the blanket. The same brand sells a handheld kind too, with a remote like a key fob.

It's not a new idea. On the MS Society's forum in 2014, somebody with a fan on a remote plug could deal with a hot flush in the night without getting up, and the plug was cheaper than a fan with its own remote.

Where the switch goes

The person who started the thread kept theirs in a basket in the middle of the bed, between them and their husband, with the phone, the TV remotes, glasses and lip balm. Everything they'd want in the night lived there, on the side they could reach.

A wall-mount remote can also stick where a light switch would be if bedrooms had one by the bed: the headboard, or the wall above the nightstand on your good side. Put it where the hand you can still use lands without looking, because you'll be pressing it in the dark.

Set it up before you need it. Plugging the box in means getting down behind the nightstand, and that's a two-handed job with a crawl in it. Do it the day before surgery, or hand the kit to whoever's bringing you home.

Or should you turn the lamp into a smart lamp?

A smart plug does the same job from your phone, or from a speaker already on the nightstand. Which suits you depends on what you'll be pressing it with.

In r/smarthome, a parent whose daughter falls asleep with her lamp on asked for a way to switch it off from a phone without taking the switch away from her. Hobbyists rather than patients, but the same lamp. Three routes came back:

• A smart plug. The lamp plugs into it, your phone or a voice assistant turns it off, and the plug has a small button of its own. One reply's catch: that button only helps if the socket is easy to reach from the bed in the dark. If you can't reach the socket, that's the whole problem over again.
• A smart bulb. Switch it off from the phone, and to get it back you flip the lamp's own switch off and on. Another reply adds that while the lamp's switch is off, the bulb is out of reach from the phone too.
• A wireless button beside the bed, paired with a smart bulb. Several replies land here: an IKEA bulb with two of its little remotes and no hub, one for the child and one for the parent, or a WiZ bulb and button. A parent who did this for their kids says the button on the nightstand works just fine.

Several of the smart-home answers end in a button beside the bed. The plain remote is that button with the bulb, the app and the hub taken out.

For someone pressing it with their eyes shut and one arm out of action, nothing to set up and nothing to re-pair is what you want. The smart versions put a bulb and an app between you and the same button.

One case goes the other way. If there's already a voice assistant on the nightstand, a Kasa smart plug gives you the lamp by voice, which asks nothing of either arm. It leans on the Wi-Fi, though, and the plain remote doesn't.

One of the three in the breast-cancer thread ran theirs from a phone, a Bluetooth switch they already owned, and that's the one who called it the best.

What it doesn't fix

It runs whatever's plugged into its boxes. The hall light and the bathroom are as far away as they were, so the kit is for the hours you're in bed, not for getting out of it.

Anyone who tidies up and turns the lamp off at its own switch has taken the remote out of the loop until it's flipped back.

Get the wall-switch kit, the kind with a remote shaped like a light switch rather than a fob, because a flat plate with on and off buttons is the easier thing to find under a hand in the dark. It comes with three plug-in boxes for the one remote, so a fan or the lamp on the other side can go on the spares.

Plug the box in while you still have two hands, put the remote in the basket on your good side, and the lamp is yours from the pillow.

Already have a voice assistant by the bed? Then the Kasa plug is the one to start with.