3 Reasons to Get Remote Lighting Control

Scenario 1
When you go to bed at night, you'd like the ability to control all the lights in the house from your nightstand. That way, if you forget to turn out a light downstairs, or if you hear a noise in the yard in the wee hours, you don't have to leave the bedroom.

HOW TO GET IT: Select the lights you want to control—hallway, kitchen, backyard—then swap out those switches for automated dimmers. Assign the switches to buttons on the controller, either one light per button or groupings of lights you want to operate together, say stairway and kitchen for late-night snack runs. Some controllers also have "all on" and "all off" buttons, which will operate every switch assigned to it at once.

Scenario 2
You're away from home frequently, or you own a vacation house, and you want to time lights to discourage would-be burglars.

HOW TO GET IT: Swap out the switches for automated hardware and program the timing of each at the control pad or wireless remote. Set the lights at haphazard intervals, so that an observer would really think someone is wandering from room to room. The advantage to digital timing is that, unlike with those pesky plug-in timers, you can switch the lights on and off whenever you want while you're home and the timer will be unaffected.

Scenario 3
You don't want to run around adjusting lights when company's at the door.

HOW TO GET IT: The ultimate in lighting control is using the system to set a whole-room scene: Dim a light here, bring up another there, until the mood is just the way you want it. Then assign your newly designed "scene" to a control panel or keypad button. You can even create several scenes in a room for different purposes—one button for cocktail-party mode, another for television watching, and a third when it's time to clean up.

This Old House magazine, January 2006
Article: Product Innovation: Remote-Controlled Lighting