Smart Home Lighting Options & Considerations

Read our full Smart Home Lighting article here: http://audioadvice.io/smartlighting
Audio Advice Smart Home Essentials:    • Smart Home Essentials | Overview & Tour  

Raleigh, North Carolina Location: https://audioadvice.io/aa-raleigh
Charlotte, North Carolina Location: https://audioadvice.io/aa-clt
Read more product reviews & shop on our website: https://audioadvice.io/aa-blog
Follow us on Instagram: https://audioadvice.io/aa-insta

Audio Advice is North Carolina's #1 smart home lighting integrator with an unlimited electrical license. We carry the top lighting control systems and have implemented systems as simple as one automated light to incredibly advanced systems over $100,000. Let’s start by talking about the various options for controlling lighting in your home. The most basic solutions are WiFi-based light bulbs that you can turn and and off with your phone. These tend to be sold online and you can buy them on Amazon or at Best Buy. They are best for smaller residences like apartments and can be fun to play with. As you move up into larger or luxury homes, the systems move to much more robust solutions that are intended to work correctly every single time and at scale. Lutron and Control4 tend to be a couple of the largest players in the lighting control space. Unlike the one-off bulb solutions, these systems don’t rely on your WiFi working or leaving your light switch on all the time so your application can talk to the bulb.

There are two different ways of implementing the major lighting control systems. The first and most prevalent is smart switches and dimmers that go in place of a traditional light switch. These switches and dimmers generally look very elegant and are able to communicate with each other and turn lights down or off. This has the advantage that you can retrofit any home with lighting control simply by changing out your legacy switches for smart switches and dimmers. The second implementation is what is called panelized lighting. In general this is only done for new homes as it requires a different type of wiring in the home. However, if you have the budget, panelized controlled lighting is the best solution available. What happens in panelized lighting is that each of your lighting loads is controlled from a central panel in the house vs. a local switch.A load is the same thing as a set of lights that come on when you turn on a switch. What this means is that you can have a single keypad at the entrance of a room that might otherwise have a bank of 4 switches all ganged up together.

Another advantage of panelized lighting systems is that the dimming capabilities and other detailed specifications are generally slightly better in panelized systems. The reason they have this advantage is that the technology does not all have to be squeezed into a small wall dimmer. There is more room for more robust technology in a lighting panel. This brings up a key point - there are several ways to dim a light. Incandescents used forward phase dimming but now there is reverse phase and other dimming technologies. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that when LED lights came out they professed to last for 20 years but many people experience them flickering and burning out early. This is often caused because the LED drivers built into the LED bulbs were not as robust for dimming as they are purported to be. I won’t go into this here, but if you are building a true luxury home and want great lighting that is not harsh on your eyes, does not flicker and looks incredible, you need to look at using higher end recessed lights than a builder would find at Lowes or Home Depot. If you live in North Carolina and have questions about this, you can go into our Raleigh or Charlotte showrooms and see both lighting controls and higher performance LEDs in our experience centers.

The best lighting control systems will work flawlessly with the top smart home systems. When implemented correctly, it will totally change the way you live. Most Audio Advice customers who have had lighting control will tell you that they cannot imagine walking around the house turning off light after light at nighttime versus just pushing one button. The same is true for integration with security systems. When you arm your security system when you leave your home, the lights, televisions and music should all turn off and a few lights should play back for security purposes to make it appear you are in the home. If you want to learn more about how lighting control fits into smart homes, motorized shades, security, etc. go to the smart home section of the Audio Advice website and we have buyers guides and videos on almost everything you need to know.