If You Love Moths (and You Should), Replace Your Porch Light With Something Better | Reviews by Wirecutter

Jun 04, 2025

By Grant Clauser

Grant Clauser is an editor who has written about audio, video, and smart-home technology for more than 20 years.

I capture indoor spiders in a cup to gently release them outside. I rescue earthworms stranded on sidewalks by moving them to the lawn. When I realized my porch lamp could be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of moths a year, I had to do something about it. In the process, I learned how important moths are to the environment, and how I could help them survive my outdoor lighting.

Moths and other night-active insects are drawn to porch lights like cats to empty boxes. Flying insects orient themselves to the sun and moon in a process called the dorsal light response; they keep the brightest thing in the sky always at their backs.

Artificial light befuddles their navigation skills. A street light or porch lamp causes them to circle around it until they get exhausted, singe themselves on a hot bulb, or fall victim to a predator. Even if the circling doesn’t kill them, spending the night flying around a lamp instead of out doing important moth things is still bad for them.

Thankfully, it’s an easy problem to fix.

If you care about the environment, you should care about moths. “Without them, we would disappear from this planet in short order,” says Doug Tallamy, entomologist and author of several books about creating insect-friendly backyards.

That’s because insects, including moths, pollinate plants and feed other animals, especially birds and bats, which makes them a key part of the ecosystem. Moth caterpillars make up most of the diet of young birds, so without moths, there would be fewer chickadees, robins, and bluebirds in yards and parks. Bird populations are on the decline already; the United States has lost about 3 billion birds in the past 50 years.

The world, meanwhile, is experiencing a massive decline in insect populations. “Light pollution is one of the major causes of insect decline,” said Tallamy, alongside other factors including habitat loss and pesticides.

Scientists believe that in nature, nighttime insects orient themselves to the ultraviolet light from the moon. In artificial lights, it’s the blue wavelengths that mislead them.

So simply changing your lights from white and blue wavelengths to yellow ones can save countless insect lives. After I switched my front and back porches from bright white to orangey-yellow, I stopped seeing insects swirling around my lamps like a mosh pit. And there’s evidence to back up the theory: A 2016 study presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference showed that warm-toned LED lights attracted significantly fewer insects than incandescent or fluorescent lights.

This affordable bulb was a standout in our testing and easy to set up, and it can produce more than 16 million colors.

Smart bulbs allow you to turn down the blue wavelengths, offering your moth friends a yellow light that is still bright enough for you to see by but won’t turn your lamp into a Death Star. You can opt for either white tone-adjustable bulbs, which allow you to tune the light from cool white to warmer hues, or 100% color-adjustable bulbs, which are capable of producing millions of colors.

Not all smart-bulb apps display color temperatures (as the app for our top-pick WiZ bulb does), but if yours does, it’s best to select 3,000 K or lower, as the DarkSky Project, an advocacy group focused on the effects of light pollution on humans and wildlife, recommends.

However, a warm yellow or orange light isn’t the best for reading. When I want to sit outside in the evening to read a book, I use the Wirecutter-recommended Glocusent Bookmark Style Reading Light for supplemental light and leave the porch light in bug-safe mode.

Another bright spot for smart lights is that they allow you to control them through simple automation. The most basic automation is to put your light on a timer, which you can do with all the smart bulbs we recommend. Set your light to turn on only during the hours in which you really need it, and then have it turn off for the rest of the night.

If you need bright white light for nighttime security or to see clearly when you approach your door, you can use motion sensors to switch to a brighter, whiter light only when they detect a person.

You have a few ways to do this. I use the motion sensor built into my smart doorbell camera to temporarily turn the light brighter when someone steps up to the door. I set up that automation by first linking both the camera and the light to the Alexa app and then using Alexa’s Routines feature to create the automated action. If you don’t use Alexa, Apple Home and Google Home each have a similar function found in the Automations section of their respective apps.

If you don’t have a security camera to use as a motion sensor, you can use a dedicated outdoor motion sensor and integrate it with your lights. Philips Hue makes an outdoor motion sensor, and although it’s designed specifically for Hue lights, when integrated with Alexa it can trigger any other smart device in the system. Govee also offers an outdoor motion sensor, but it works only with Govee lights. Ring’s outdoor Solar Pathlights include built-in motion sensors that you can use the same way.

Some people may prefer to avoid automation and be tempted to forgo smart bulbs in favor of yellow bulbs marketed as “bug lights.” But Tallamy warned me that sometimes those merely use a yellow filter on the glass and still emit blue wavelengths, so if you prefer non-smart bulbs, make sure to select bulbs that don’t simply rely on a color filter. Also, unlike with smart LED bulbs, you can’t change the color or brightness of a bug light, nor can you automate the light for your human visitors.

Once you’ve taken steps to reduce insect death by porch light and help the overall environment, consider other things you can do for your local wildlife. For example, don’t use bug zappers and other indiscriminate methods to kill mosquitoes, because they kill more beneficial insects (including moths) than pests.

Tallamy also suggests looking at your lawn. “We’ve got 44 million acres of lawn in this country, and lawn is not supporting pollinators,” he said. He adds that grass lawns don’t help manage watersheds, and they don’t sequester carbon. Instead, he recommends reducing your lawn by planting trees and native plants that support insects and the food web: “It’s our personal responsibility as residents of planet Earth.” Every small step is important — one lawn or one bulb at a time.

This article was edited by Katie Okamoto and Maxine Builder.

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Grant Clauser

Senior Editor

I’m an editor whose coverage areas encompass audio, video, and smart-home devices, including headphones, TVs, and security cameras.

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