Automated Lighting

      Home lighting can be as simple as a pendant drop light hanging in the middle of a room ceiling or elaborate automated scene or mood lighting with recessed coloured dimmable lights complimented with down lighters or Chandeliers.

It is not only the types of lights that can vary in a home (LED light bulbs, Halogen, Low Energy, Spots, Down Lights, Wireless Controlled), there are many different types of lighting control systems such as brand names like: Lutron, Control4, MX2, CYTECH, X10, EnOcean, Crestron and many more.

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Automation for Comfort

Most of these lighting control systems can work and integrate with other home control systems to enhance living spaces by automatically adjusting light scenes through the day and night, sensing when rooms are not being used and turning off lights, or automatically turning them on when someone walks into a room.

Turn down midday heat by filtering daylight entering a room. Reduce cooling costs by lowering blinds in the summer to help prevent the suns rays from heating up a room and causing air conditioning to work overtime. Raise Blinds automatically in the winter to help capture heat from those rays and lower

heating costs.

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Automated Lighting for the Home

Home Automation and Lighting Control Systems are now changing so fast it's hard to keep up with the latest technology, many new Lighting Control systems are emerging which now link to your smart phone or Tablet and can be accessed over the internet. Older systems are also allowing access via smartphones and Tablets but if you are building a New Home which system do you go far?

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How should I wire a new home for Automatic Lighting?

I believe there are two main differences for wiring a home for Automated lighting,:

1, Conventional wiring with local switches operating room lights.

2, Wiring a home with Automated lighting in mind.

Depending on your choice, these two different methods would be wired in different ways and it is important to grasp the basic concept!

Method 1,Conventional for many years usually incorporates a lighting ring main (cables from your Fuse box/ Consumer unit) for each floor or circuit, this means cable with power supply going directly to the lights and to local wall switches.

This means in practice all cables need to be able to carry high (240v) voltage and current between Consumer units/lights and switches (Bathrooms and wet areas being the exception).

Method 2, Differs from above in that Switches are wired to a central computer control point with smaller voltage handling size cable (or on a network). Heavy duty power cables are still used, however combinations of routes directly from the central computer controlled point and local fuse boards gives the ability to programme lights in many different ways and gives the ability for any switch to be programmed for any light or group of lights anywhere in your Home.

This means in practice NOT all cables need to carry high (240v) voltage and current between lights and switches.

Interesting Lights available