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 They were likely state of the art for the day, but are now so out-of-date as to be almost comical in some cases.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...