Lighting system for a new house

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:

  1. 0-10v: More complicated wiring, lower quality dimming.
  2. DALI(2): High quality dimming, easier wiring since you can put 64 lights on one set of wires
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

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I don’t have an answer… but I’m in a similar situation. Would love to hear people’s views on this!

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I chose 0-10V for my house. It feels okay, but the wiring is complicated.

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Standard wiring up to current code standards for your Geography (lo voltage or custom jobs scare off buyers and limits service-ability)

Use open standards for your local communications to devices.

(also we need to know where you are for betlst reccommmendations. Power requirements and device availability varies by geo)

For me, I’m in the US. I have Northamerica standard 110/15 to most circuits but also demanded a two gang to every primary light switch box in every room with 14/3 romex instead of the standard 14/2 just in case ceiling fans. But then I have ZWave or Zigbee stuff everywhere.

The system runs well, is 100% local and best of all I don’t have to buy ‘special’ fixtures or hire only one company if I need service.

Sorry, makes lots of sense, I’m in the US.

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