Getting the most from Smart Lighting Control

Smart lighting is often misunderstood.

Smart lighting is not about flashy switches with dozens of buttons or colour changing lighting everywhere. Smart lighting control is about allowing people to use their lighting more easily and effectively, saving energy and enhancing convenience and integrating with a wider smart home system to improve security and safety.

In rooms such as large open plan kitchen / living rooms, an appropriate lighting design would almost certainly allow for at least eight circuits of lighting (i.e. pendants, lamps, spotlights, over counter lights etc.). This would mean two sets of four-way rotary dimmer switches are needed to control the lights if a lighting control system is not installed. You would, therefore, have to press and twist eight switches every time you want to set a suitable lighting level in the room for cooking, cleaning, entertaining etc. It’s not exactly user-friendly or convenient.

A smart lighting system would transform the operation of the lights in the room as only a single smart switch would be needed and the exact levels of light you require for each usage of the room can be programmed into a single button. So instead of having to adjust eight rotary dimmer switches to set the lighting mood for entertaining, you now only have to press a single button engraved with “Entertaining”.

When you expand your lighting control system in the rest of the house, a whole new set of benefits come in to play. For example, when you set your burglar alarm as you leave the house, the smart system sees the alarm is set, automatically turning off all of the lights in the house and turning on a holiday lighting mode to run at night.

Through the link to your smart home system (or via Lutron’s own app) you can also control all of the lights in the house from your mobile phone. So if a fire alarm or burglar alarm goes off during the night, you can turn on and illuminate a pathway to the door.

Lutron lighting systems also feature geofencing on your mobile phone so when you are returning home and reach within a ½ a mile of your house, for example, the system will automatically turn on your garden lighting and internal lights to guide you through the house and into the kitchen so you don’t have to come home to a dark house.

Easy!