Paul’s Tech Makeover: Lighting Basics (Premium)

Last week, we finally moved to our new home in Pennsylvania. And while it’s taking us longer than I’d hoped to get up and running here, we’ve started planning the improvements that this house needs.

Much of what we’re doing here won’t be of much interest, or won’t be relevant from a personal technology standpoint. But the short version is that we’ve moved into a family home that hasn’t been updated in quite some time. My father had moved here in the mid-1990s after living in London for several years.

Exciting, right? But where this gets interesting is that my dad worked at Lutron, which is based here in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. Lutron is a lighting company, if you will, really a light control company that serves both commercial and residential customers. But its claim to fame is that the company founder, Joel Spira, invented the first solid-state dimmer control, which was small enough to fit inside the standard residential wall box for a light switch.

I am pretty sure I have that exact dimmer in my new house.

OK, not literally. But the lighting controls in this house are mostly 15- to 20 years old. They were likely state of the art for the day, but are now so out-of-date as to be almost comical in some cases. Worse, the sheer complexity of the controls is almost overwhelming. And one of my first goals here is to simplify that. Make sense of it.

My daughter would like one of my first goals to be “install the smart lighting, already.” I will get to that, and as I noted previously, I want to do this right. Which means, among other things, not gratuitously just adding smart lights everywhere but using them correctly, and making the controls make sense. So we’ll get there.

But first things first.

When you consider some of the things that the new home needs immediately—fresh paint throughout the interior, for example, some updating in the kitchen, and so on—the item that comes to the top of the list is the lighting controls and other wall plates that cover the walls everywhere. This needs to be rectified before we paint, for sure, because what I’d like to do is remove a bunch of them, and consolidate down to a saner set of controls.

Let me use an example so this makes sense. My new home office used to be a den in the front of the home—it has a fireplace in it, like all home offices—and it’s particularly poorly done. My father at some point slightly lowered the ceiling so he could put in ten round recessed lights. And on the walls, there are at least 8 lighting controls. (There are really 10 if you include two that are right around a corner, but let’s not make this even more complex.) It’s a mess.

So. How do I even begin to describe this stupidity? Visually, of course.

Here we see a heating control—there’s one in each room, which is both a nicety and a complexity, but the heat is separate, and separately controlled, from the air conditioning, which is just a complexity—and two light switch plates.

On the top plate, there is a dimmer for two of the recessed lights in my office and a light switch for the kitchen light; the kitchen is in the next room. (In a bit of Mickey Mousery I will never condone, that kitchen light switch is just an on/off control that controls both the lights and the fan in the kitchen because my dad added the fan after the fact, and seriously, what the hell.)

On the bottom plate, there are three dimmers. Each of which controls some of the recessed lights in my office.

A few words about these dimmers.

You tap them twice on the top to fully turn on whatever light(s) they control, which is pretty much all you’d ever want to do. (That is, actually dimming these lights is somewhat pointless; on and off would be enough for the most part.) But you tap them once, on the bottom, to turn them off.

Every lighting control in this home is like a little game where you walk up and start tapping them to see what, if anything, turns on. I suppose we’d eventually just adapt to what’s here, but there are some additional wrinkles that make figuring this out difficult. For example, some lights are just out, so nothing comes on when you tap a dimmer. In other cases, the dimmer is connected to a power outlet to which you’re supposed to connect a lamp. And since there’s no lamp connected, nothing happens when you tap it. (Also, since we don’t know which outlets are meant to be controlled by switches, we’ve plugged things into these outlets that we want on all the time, like the TV. So if you flick the switch while using such a device, hilarity ensues.)

Confused yet? That’s just one wall.

Over by the other doorway (in this case leading toward the bottom of the stairs, by the front door), we see this little monster.

I’m not sure what this is actually called. But each of the buttons controls some number of the recessed lights in what is now my home office. The lights that each control do not exactly match the dimmers that I described previously. Which sounds unlikely, if not impossible. But we’ve spent a lot of time screwing around with it. That bottom button, at least, is obvious: It turns off all of the lights at once.

Over by the third door in the room, which heads to the garage, there are two more dimmers.

The one on the left controls two of the recessed lights in the ceiling, and this one does, in fact, match up with one of the dimmers in that first photo. And to be fair, this one actually makes some sense: It creates a lighting path as you enter from the garage, useful if the house were dark when you entered. The one of the right … does something. Right now, we have no idea what. (Possibly it’s related to the garage, though it appears that the lights there are working and are separately controlled by—wait for it—a two dimmer panel right on the other side of that wall.

OK, that’s (most of) the light switches in this room. Like I said, it’s a mess.

My goal for this one room, lighting control-wise, is the following. Remove that multi-button thing entirely as it is redundant and I will never use it. Figure out what that one dimmer does by the garage door but leave that switch plate intact. And consolidate those two plates by the kitchen door down to one. I figure I need two on/off switches (with dimmers), each of which will control five recessed lights. And then I’ll move that kitchen switch into the kitchen, on the other side of the wall. And wire the fan correctly so that it can be controlled separately from the light.

And that’s just one room. (At least the lights are OK; we have to replace lights in many rooms too.)

And, it’s not just the lights. In each room, there is also a strange assortment of other things on the wall. For example, most rooms also have a cable TV jack, which I’ll be removing in most places. And an old-school telephone jack, which I will be removing everywhere.

For those switches, plates, whatever that are remaining, each will be updated to something modern. And something white. I suppose the almond-colored parts were chosen to match some country kitchen style that made sense to my dad here in Pennsylvania two decades ago, but it all looks old fashioned, and just old, to us here in 2017. It all needs to be replaced.

The replacements can come after the paint. But the design of the wall switches, the wall box placements, has to happen first. So that the painters can cover them over before painting. So this, too, is a logistical issue of sorts.

I don’t want to muddy the waters too much here, but the other related issue here is those smart lights, which I’ve been kind of obsessing over. We have some ideas about ambient lighting around the kitchen cabinets, and perhaps in other areas like behind the TV. But in those places where we do use smart light bulbs, we have to bridge the gap between smartphone app controls, which are powerful but non-discoverable, and actual physical light switches, which are simple and discoverable, but can screw up whatever lighting schemes we’ve created. I’ll figure it out, I think. But the best way to proceed is unclear.

Anyway, we have a lot of work to do. But we’re here now. And that work is finally beginning.