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A lot, and I mean a LOT of our customers building a new home have no idea what “centralized lighting” is. That is the more universal term for it, but it is also known as “panelized lighting”. It is more well known around the larger metroplexes and is slowly gaining popularity here in Tyler Texas. You might even have an older home with a more old school way of doing it before automation companies like Control4 and Savant came out with a more streamlined system.
Centralized Lighting is a system where all of your lighting “loads” are controlled from one centralized panel (normally in the garage next to the main breaker box). This allows one system to control all of your dimming and switching. Some brands like Savant even have energy management properties that go along with them.
Control4 Centralized Lighting on the left and Savant Panelized Lighting on the right.
When done, every light in your home can be dimmed and controlled by your chosen home automation system. You can use your phone, tablet, on-wall touch pads, etc.. to control everything. But there are also other benefits besides just being able to control them.
One of the biggest advantages is aesthetics. Imagine a kitchen that has an island light, under cabinet and over cabinet lighting, can lights, etc.. That's a bank of four switches on a wall, not counting your three ways or four ways that would be positioned at different entrances of the kitchen. It clutters up your wall space.
The keypads are backlit and even have light sensors to actively adjust to ambient light.
With centralized lighting, you declutter your walls and create an endless amount of flexibility, because we replace your normal light switches with one keypad. That one keypad uses the same amount of room as a single switch, and can control up to six different lights. Not only that, but the keys can be programmed for “scenes” and other functions instead of individual light control.
And of course, the keypads are offered in a range of colors and designs to match the interior of your home.
Let’s say when you walk into the kitchen, you want to turn on the island light and both the under/over cabinet lighting. You’d have to flip three switches, or even with a keypad press three buttons. However, we can also program one button to turn them all on or off at once with a single press. It allows you to do what YOU want in YOUR home in regards to lighting. Because we can make any button on a keypad turn on any light anywhere in the entire home.
So if you move in, and after a few months of being there you start thinking “It would really be nice to turn on this light over here instead of over there..” then all we do is program it to the keypad and button you want. If you want a button to turn on ALL of your floodlights at once, instead of different areas, we can do that. Worried about not knowing what button does what? We have you covered there too with custom engravings so there's no guessing.
The backlighting is also full RGB and customizable per keypad.
If you’re using a control system like Control4 or Savant, and doing more than just lighting, the possibilities are endless with what we can program the keypads to do. So it adds even more control and customization to your home.
You can walk into the Great Room, and press a button we have labeled “Movie Night”.
It can:
There are so many customizable options for every customer and home. If you're going to bed and can't remember if you turned the lights off somewhere, we can add a button that says "Night Time" in the bedroom that turns off all of the lights you want at night. Come home at night and the house is pitch black? We can add a "Home" button where you enter that lights up a pathway for you through the house or turns on a few to light the areas you want.
So many choices, customized completely to your preferences!
Nope! You are not required in any way to do anything else except the centralized lighting, some networking, a main brain or controller, and keypads. Wherever you would have a light switch or a bank of switches, you get one keypad the size of a single switch. If you have more than six loads to control in that area we have to do two keypads, so just keep that in mind.
We can also do an on-wall touch screen if you’d like full control over everything from a single location like the Master Bedroom or the Great Room. You always have full control from the app on your phone, but it makes it more convenient.
I would say the majority of homes we do at least have a couple of zones of audio and video control too. It just ends up working out that way since most customers come to us for that first and then find out we do lighting as well. It makes it nice to be able to tie everything together under one easy to use control system.
That is perfectly fine. Every one of our consultants has gone through the training for centralized lighting and can walk the electrician through how to wire the home. We are used to electricians not completely understanding how it works at first and can provide them with all of the resources they need.
Once they do though, it ends up being easier for them because you’re running less romex in the home than normal and the path of their wires is straight forward. During our prewire phase, WE are the ones who run a wire to each keypad location which would have normally been light switches. It is a low-voltage type four conductor wire that hops from one keypad location to the next location in the loop.
You can also see exactly how many loads these two keypads are controlling. Imagine if there were that many switches on the wall!
The electrician would normally have to run romex to the switch on the wall, then to a light fixture. And if you had three ways and four ways, they’d have to run even more for their traveler wires so multiple switches can control one light. When they wire for centralized lighting, they jump wires from the breaker panel to our lighting panel, and run ONE dedicated line of romex from the lighting panel straight to the light fixture.
There is a lot more that goes on with a centralized lighting system than we can fit into a short blog. It involves a lot of planning, communication, and coordination on our part to make sure you are happy with the end result. But if you’re building a custom home and think this is something you’d be interested in, Contact Us through the website or give us a call. We would be happy to sit down with you and your plans to go over everything involved with this kind of system!