The general consensus about lighting controls is that their main benefit is to make things simple. In our mind, and surely for most people, this doesn’t mean having an endless number of buttons to press.

Having a lighting control system should make life easier, offering a straightforward approach that doesn’t require excessive amount of thought or effort. There is no sense in having a control system that ultimately needs you to adjust 6 different dimmers in a room, just to get the beautiful space you want to achieve - surely it should just be a simple as pressing a button, and the desired result happens.

Our advice would be this; think about how you use a room, and that will tell you how many buttons you need. For example, a dining room is a place used for entertaining and eating. So most homes will need a brighter setting for family dinners, and a more ambient setting for romantic dinners or entertaining guests. So with two purposes, that equates to two buttons.

The next question is of course, how do you get this? Make sure that the commissioning engineer or programmer does not finish their work until all of the lighting controls have been set up to your liking. In our experience, often they are waiting on others to instruct them on what to do, rather than be proactive. If they are not provided with any guidance, more often than not they will leave basic settings such as 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, and off, which ultimately means you are paying 10-20 times too much for having 1 dimmer for all of the lights in the room.

Lighting controls are amazing, but only if they are set up correctly to ensure they deliver the desired results, with minimum input from the user.