The 5 Best Ways to Get Started with Home Lighting Automation

March 27, 2017

Home lighting automation is a great way to upgrade your home into a smart home or to add to an existing automated system, such as climate control, distributed sound, or visual entertainment. These types of systems increase convenience, security, safety and efficiency in your home, all while accentuating design details and creating just the right atmosphere for any event.

If you’re just getting started with home lighting automation, you may want to start small, perhaps with a room or two, and work your way up step-by-step until you have a full home system.

Many systems, including Lutron’s lighting solutions, can be quickly implemented with easy-to-install packages, making it simple and hassle-free to improve the convenience and accessibility of any space in your home.

Here, we’ll cover five of the best ways to get started with home lighting automation:

1. Ease of Entertainment

Imagine sitting down with friends and family for a movie that’s streaming through your entertainment center. Everything is just right—the screen is crystal clear, the sound is perfect, and you’ve just settled in comfortably as the opening scene starts to play. Perfect, that is, except for one little detail:

The lights are still on.

Instead of having to get up (or ask someone else) to hit the lights, wouldn’t it be convenient to shut them off right where you’re sitting? Even better, it would set just the right tone to have the lights fade to black, all without anyone having to get up. Just hit a button on a remote and watch the lights fade out as the movie begins.

Lutron’s wireless lighting systems allow you to easily create a custom lighting system that lets you get this exact effect and more, making your living room a great place to start with automated lighting.

2. Light the Facilities

It happens to us all—at some point on some nights, you just have to go. You sleepily get up, stumble in a groggy haze down the hall to the bathroom, and fumble with the light switch, missing three or four times as you feel around in the dark.

With an automated lighting system in the facilities, this is no longer a problem. Open the door, trigger a motion sensor, and the lights will blink on to let you take care of business, then shut off after you get back to bed. You can even program the lights to activate as a soft glow rather than snap on in a brilliant blaze in the middle of the night, so you don’t have to blink and squint in the sudden glare of bright bathroom lighting.

3. Light a Workspace

Suppose you’re working on a project in your home office. It has your full attention, and you hardly notice the natural light through the window growing dimmer and dimmer as the sun sets. Your eyes have to strain to see your keyboard and read your handwritten notes, but you’re too absorbed in your work to be bothered with the lights. You’re on a roll, and you won’t let anything short of total blindness stop you.

An automated lighting system in a home workspace, whether it’s an office, work shed or garage, will allow you to keep working without breaking your focus. Instead of having to pull your attention away and hit a light switch when it starts getting dark, you can program your lights to turn on or brighten as the sun dips under the horizon. This can help you make the most of natural light while seamlessly transitioning to electric bulbs as it gets dark.

4. Home Security

Pretend for a second that you are a thief scoping out homes on a well-to-do street. You have your attention set on one house with the lights out. You watched the lights shut off about an hour ago, but there have been no other signs that anyone is home. It might be an automated system keeping to a schedule while the family is away. Or someone might be home. You can’t be sure.

At any rate, the lights have been dark for a while now, so you decide to chance it. You approach the house, crowbar in hand, your eyes focused on a window off to the side behind a bush. Your heart races as you get close, closer, nearly to the wall—

And the porch light suddenly blazes on. You hightail it away, your nerves crumbling as your flight instincts take over. Looking back, the kitchen light has come on as well, and you decide to try somewhere else once you get yourself calmed down.

An automated lighting system can bolster your home security by deterring would-be thieves, making it as unattractive a target as possible.

5. Incorporate It into Existing Systems

If you already have an automated home system, you can start your lighting automation by incorporating it into that system. For example, if your heating and cooling systems are set to automatically slow down after dark, you can program your lights to follow suit. Turning on a television with a remote can trigger a dimming of the lights in the room to go with it. With the right design, virtually anything is possible.

Get Started with Home Lighting Automation

Whether you’re looking to add to an existing home system or to implement automated lighting on its own in a single room, there is one starting point that should not be ignored—that of involving professional assistance. Livewire can help you design and implement a home lighting automation system that will satisfy your needs. To learn more about our services, contact us today at 804-554-0372.