Transforming your home into an exciting and interactive one isn’t an easy job but it is one of the most rewarding jobs especially when you do it to the plan!
Everyone has a great imagination on how to make their home stunning inside out but often worried where to begin? We would say plan and design are your first step. If you are unsure, please get a professional / consultant to help. Please note, a plan is what will make your project succeed or fail. And you should also be able to break your design into milestones so you start realising value even before you complete your project and doesn’t become an overwhelming assignment.
We often break our designs either by domain e.g. lighting, security or by use cases e.g. garden automation that covers sprinklers, outdoor lights, fountains, pool pump etc for the clients to choose their path forward. In the interest of this blog lets cover what you can do with your lights to make your home stunning and experience the luxury immediately.
To begin with, let us briefly revise the topic of the protocols. At a high-level you need to make a decision on wired vs wireless technology. Wired protocols like C-bus, X10 are often hard to expand upon. Wireless like WiFi, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, Matter, etc. have some trade offs on latency but gains on expanding and retrofitting. We personally prefer wireless, Z-Wave as it is secured, extensible & inexpensive, can easily be retrofitted and has extensive interoperability between manufacturers. And to top it up, it works on a radio frequency and can work offline.
So that brings us to, what can light automation do! Clearly, anything that you can imagine, turn on/off, dim/brighten, change colour (for the supported lights), you can set up integrated scenes with weather, sunrise/sunset times, etc. There are quite a few manufacturers of z-wave light modules that make variety of lighting modules e.g. FIBARO Double/Single Switch, Dimmer & Bypass, RGBW that can change your existing lights into smart lights and make it ready to operate via mobile app or voice command via a hub. The hub/gateway, is the central brain that controls all the devices within its network and that what it makes is easily interoperable. These modules go behind your switch plate and hence can be retrofitted without running any additional wires. Isn’t that nifty and clean, anyone visitors wouldn’t even know!
Let me leave you with this thought, plan & design all you need but you have to have light automation in your home, that will save you energy and also add luxury to it.