Lighting Control System Technologies

Steve Mccurdy: Hi, this is Steve Mccurdy from Leviton Manufacturing and we're speaking to you today about lighting systems for the home. Now when you think about the lighting control system for the home, there are several things to keep in mind. One is are you building a brand new home or you are in an existing home and you want to add lighting controls or automation to the home.

If you're building a home, one technology might be too pre-wire with low voltage wiring to multiple locations in a home and there you would have a panel just like the power distribution of your home where all of that low voltage wiring comes to and all of your lighting is wired to. This typically takes a lot of advanced planning but is used in some of the higher scale homes of today. More popular today though is wireless type lighting control. This allows you to implement the controls either at any stage of the construction phase or during the retro fit, and it's a scalable type solution. What I mean by that is you can start very small at one, two, five, six devices and grow with the automation as it goes further. Now there's two different types of technology that are used today in wireless lighting controls. One is called the Power line Carrier. Now power line carrier uses the existing wire in your home to transmit signals from one device to another. It's typically in older technology but still very prevalent today. One of the newer technologies out there today is radio frequency controlled products. Each device has a Radio Frequency Processor that's put into it whether it be a switch or a dimmer or some type of a keypad. Wire simply allows you to replace an existing switch or dimmer with a RF type product and then it allows you to control those products either automatically via time and day control or from any location in the home. Next, we're going to talk about some of those significant benefits for using the Lighting Control system in the home.