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As I wrote previously in Paul's Tech Makeover: Lighting Basics (Premium), our new house is full of a complex mess of out-of-date lighting controls.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 sti...