Lutron lighting control

Panelised dimming versus wall boxes

There are two ways to build a lighting system. In a wall-box system the dimmers live behind the faceplates throughout the house. In a panelised system — Lutron HomeWorks or Athena — all the dimming hardware lives in centralised panels in a plant room, and the wall devices are keypads carrying no load at all.

Panelised is more expensive up front and better in almost every other respect: the walls carry clean engraved keypads instead of banks of dimmers, the dimming curves are considerably better at the bottom of the range, and service happens in the plant room rather than in your hallway. For anything above roughly 60 loads we would normally recommend it.

Keypads and the language of the house

Engraving is where a lighting system either becomes usable or doesn't. We spend real time on keypad schedules — what each button says, in what order, in which rooms, so the house reads consistently. A keypad by the front door that says Welcome / Entertain / Dining / Goodnight is a system anybody can operate. A keypad with six unlabelled buttons is a system that gets used at full brightness forever.

Ketra and tunable light

Ketra fixtures change colour temperature and intensity through the day — warm and low in the early morning, full spectrum at midday, warm again by evening. In mountain properties with deep overhangs and long winter nights the difference in how a room feels is significant. Ketra runs natively on Lutron controls, so it becomes part of the same scenes as everything else.

Retrofit without rewiring

Not every project is new construction. Lutron RadioRA 3 is a wireless system that retrofits into existing wall boxes without pulling new cable, which makes it the practical route for an occupied house or a listed structure. It supports the same scene programming, the same keypads and the same Control4 integration as its wired siblings.