Or “Who Knew Lighting Could Be This Hard?”
Going down the rabbit hole with a new home and trying to figure out lighting. Rough list of desires:
- Tunable white fixtures & strips
- Simple wiring
- Local (open) control (not cloud)
Taking each one in turn:
Tuneable White
With infinite money I might consider Ketra, but it seems like there are high quality dim-to-dark and tunable white LEDs which would provide much of what I like from Ketra (warm color yes, blue disco no). It also seems like HA would allow fairly doing things like “dim to warm” and changing color temperature across the day without much work given basic Tunable White LEDs.
Simple Wiring/Drivers
I’ve seen a few different systems:
- 0-10v: More complicated wiring, lower quality dimming.
- DALI(2): High quality dimming, easier wiring since you can put 64 lights on one set of wires
- Wireless: ZigBee in, control out e.g. DALI. This seems pretty idea as you can just run 110v to these, DALI to fixtures and avoid a bunch of low-voltage wiring and centralized power supplies. Something like this looks pretty interesting.
- Proprietary: Lots of these…
Control
Lots of vendors have different proprietary systems. ZigBee seems nice and open and local. I’m sure there are others.
So turning this around—if you had similar desires, what did you go with? What am I missing?
Edit: I’m in the US; clearly details would vary per country.