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Don’t Make These Home Lighting Mistakes
Don’t Make These Home Lighting Mistakes
You know you can go to your local Best Buy (a home-grown Minnesota favorite) or Home Depot and find all sorts of smart devices for your home. Smart light bulbs, thermostats, locks, irrigation controllers, and much more are easily found up and down the aisles. So why not put them together your own smart home?
Of course, you can take this approach. But prepare to think like a home technology integrator like Lelch Audio-Video. We like to explain it this way: If you are reasonably handy, there’s a lot you can do with the right tools and materials from Home Depot to fix or upgrade your home. On the other hand, you may not want to take on a complete remodel of your home.
When it comes to something like smart lighting, you may want to add some intelligent light somewhere, like an outside light that you can program to come on at sunset. Or maybe you can put in a few smart bulbs that you can dim and control with your smartphone or with Alexa on your Echo smart speaker.
But doing lighting right is both art and science. The art is in achieving the right aesthetic effect, and the science is in having the right amount of lighting and easy and consistent control of your home’s illumination. To that end, we’d like to point out a few common mistakes we often see when lighting projects are not fully baked. The good news: Lelch Audio-Video is a certified Lutron smart lighting installer, and we can help you avoid these mistakes in your Woodbury home.
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THE MOTION DETECTING LIGHT
Motion detecting lighting is an excellent idea. When you walk by the light, it can turn on automatically. It might be just the right thing for taking out the garbage outside or having a light come on when you enter the laundry room. But think wisely about motion detection. Are there some times you don’t want the light to come on? Does it always turn on at the highest brightness? What might seem like a convenience may get annoying if it doesn’t have customizability.
SMART BULB, DUMB SWITCH
A host of smart light bulbs are available that communicate wirelessly over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and other wireless protocols, sometimes through hub controllers. These are easy to install without replacing your light switch. They typically work through a smartphone app and can be programmed to turn on and off at specific times, your location, or other triggers. That’s great, but if you still have your same light switch that controls the electrical load, you have to remember that the switch needs to be on for the smart light to work. If you have three and four-way switches controlling the same lights, that might get either annoying or confusing. The lights may be smart, but you may not like having to pull out your smartphone just to turn one on.
BE MINDFUL OF CONNECTIVITY
Smart lighting depends on a robust connectivity solution, whether it’s Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or a common smart home protocol like Zigbee. These communications protocols have limitations with distances and intervening walls, and sometimes potential interference from wireless signals. When you flip a regular light switch, it just works – unless you’ve blown a circuit breaker, which doesn’t happen often. Some smart lighting products have unexplained glitches where the light doesn’t come on or go off. Most of that has to do with wireless communication, and sometimes lagging software. You have to build your solution mindful of the limitations of your chosen system.
THE LUTRON DIFFERENCE
Lutron invented the first dimmer, so they’ve been making lighting smarter for a long time. They understand lighting from both the traditional electrical view and the new intelligent control features, producing some of the world’s most sophisticated lighting control solutions for small to large residential and commercial applications. You can count on Lutron products to not only provide an innovative smart control feature but to be part of a solution that can go from one room to your whole property.
If you want a smart lighting solution that will both grow with your needs and serve you over time, Lelch can specify and install the right Lutron solution for you in Woodbury. Call or reach out to our team today, or click below to connect with us immediately.No video selected.