Paul’s Tech Makeover: Lighting Progress (Premium)

A while back, I discussed the crazy mess of lighting controls in our new home. This week, we’re finally almost done fixing it.

As I wrote previously in Paul’s Tech Makeover: Lighting Basics (Premium), our new house is full of a complex mess of out-of-date lighting controls. So job one was to get that sorted out and try to consolidate as many of these redundant switches, dimmers, and other controls into the smallest number possible. Once that is done, we can move on to other related house improvements, like the interior painting. Not to mention our lives.

There are a couple of rooms that are particularly bad, lighting controls-wise, in the house. But the worst is the room I’m using as my office now. So I used that as the obvious example in that previous article, noting that there were at least 8 lighting controls on the walls in this room when we’ve moved in.

Well, as of today there are just five. And while I wasn’t able to achieve the exact level of simplification/consolidation I had hoped for, I’m still quite happy with the results. (I’m less happy with how long this is taking, but whatever.)

So let’s do a before and after comparison on one wall.

As you may recall, next to the doorway leading from this room and into the kitchen, there were five controls on two switch plates, plus that weird radiant heating control.

Today, there are three. (Plus that weird radiant heating control.) And that hole will be patched when we paint.

But what I really like about this change is that there were previously four switches that controlled eight overhead lights (with two lights assigned to each switch). I asked the electrician to change this into two switches with four lights each (since there are two sets of four in neat rows). The third switch, which I wanted to be removed, is for the light in the kitchen around the corner. I basically lost on that one, but again, it’s better than before.

Reducing switch/dimmer count is one thing. But I also wanted to be smart about which lights actually need dimmers. And in those cases where we do have dimmers, that those dimmers work correctly.

So what does that mean? As I noted previously, my father (previous owner of the house) worked at Lutron, and he used whatever Lutron parts were then-current as he updated and expanded the house back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As part of this work, he used far too many dimmers, in my opinion. But he also used the wrong kind of dimmer.

There are many types of dimmer switches, but if you consider just the flat type that I prefer, you could do what he did or you can do what I’m doing. That is, he used an older version of what is now called the Lutron Maestro dimmer. The way this works is that you have to double-tap the top half of the switch to turn on the light (and you can program it to be whatever level of light you prefer). To turn it off, you tap the bottom half of the switch. (You can also manually adjust the light, but let’s stick with the basics here.)

That’s a lot of work to turn a light on and off. And even after being in the house for weeks, all of us have tapped one of these once to turn it on, started walking into whatever room, realized we actually needed to double-tap it, stepped back and regarded the thing, and then did it right. These things are aggravating.

In most cases, we just want the light fully on. For example, my dad had used this dimmer for the lights inside the garage. Those lights just need to be on or off. No one would ever want to dim those. So in cases like that, moving to a simple on-off switch made sense, and that was the change we made. On. Off. What a concept.

But in you can imagine some situations in which you would want to dim the lights (and/or would like the default “on” position to be less than 100 percent of the full power of the light). The thing is, you still usually only want on/off as the primary function. So I asked that we use a dimmer, like the Lutron Diva dimmer switch, where dimming is the secondary function.

That is, the big, primary switch is just on/off, and it gives a satisfying click when used. You press the top for on, and the bottom for off. (Or, the reverse, depending on the state of the light.) Simple.

But if you do want to dim those lights for some reason, you can, thanks to the smaller slider on the side. It’s a secondary function, and will rarely be used, but it’s there if you need it. The best part here, though, is that anyone can use an on/off switch. You don’t need a degree in electrical engineering to turn the light on or off. Or to remember that some switches are just switches while others are dimmers. They all work the same way.

Put simply, common sense prevails.

Speaking of common sense, the other change is the bulbs in those 8 lights. When we moved in, they were standard 60-watt or 75-watt interior (I can’t remember) dimmable flood lights. Switching those to LED bulbs saves an incredible amount of energy—each bulb is rated at just 6 watts—but there’s another huge benefit: LED bulbs don’t throw off that much heat at all, where the previous bulbs were heating up the room. And in this case, my office with its many PCs, that’s the last thing I wanted.

Again, just common sense.

There’s a lot more going on here with the electricity and lighting—we’ve replaced a lot of light fixtures around the house, and have added under- and over-cabinet LED strip lighting in the kitchen, for example. But the next big task for me (in this area) is figuring out how and where we’ll be implementing smart lighting in the home.

We’re going to start small and keep it related to home entertainment at first—ambient lighting around the TV, for example, and in the sunroom where we might have get-togethers, listen to music, and so on—but I will be looking into sensor-based automatic lighting (perhaps outside) and more. But there’s only so much time—and money—and this foundational electric work has taken much longer than I’d hoped, and has cost a lot more than I’d hoped too. But we feel its worth it to get this right before we move on to anything else.

More soon.