On the eve of the CEDIA Business and Technology Forum earlier this month, AWE Europe and
IE Residential convened another ‘AWEsome Forum’, this time to discuss trends in residential lighting control systems.
Around the table were:
Paddy Baker (chair) – editor, IE Residential
Will Brocklebank – director and head of technology, Face to Face Digital
Simon Buddle – technical director, SMC
Philippe Regnier – business development manager, Philips Dynalite
Iain Shaw – partner, Brilliant
Paul Mott – sales director, AWE Europe
Mal Fisher – training manager, AWE Europe
To begin, we asked the installers present how important lighting control is to their business.
Iain Shaw of Brilliant said: “Lighting in its totality – fittings, design, consultancy, M&E work and control systems – is 45% of our revenue. And it’s the nicest 45%, because it’s predictable, it’s manageable, it’s robust and it’s grown-up.”
Will Brocklebank of Face to Face Digital pointed out that clients get a lot of benefit from lighting control systems, as they solve real-world problems. “When a mother comes downstairs with her child on her arm at two o’clock in the morning and just wants to heat up a bottle of milk, a lighting control system can make that a little easier,” he said.
SMC’s Simon Buddle agreed on the fundamental importance of lighting control to his business. “Lighting control systems are robust because they have to be,” he observed. “The stuff that breaks is the boys’ toys. If we just sold lighting controls and shades, I could go home on Friday night and not get phoned up until the next customer rang on Tuesday to check if I had one of these systems.”
We then moved on to the question of what clients are looking for, from their lighting control systems, what are they expecting, and how much selling needs to be done?
Shaw commented that he found it easier to sell a £20,000 lighting control system than a £20,000 media server system or a £20,000 home automation system. “Lighting control is better, more robust and people just seem to get it really well,” he said.
Brocklebank’s experience was different, though. The views of many of his customers were coloured by bad experience of the technology over the last 15 to 20 years. “They tend to think it's a real playboy thing, they tend to think it’s all about glass and steel and the 1980s and tiny little buttons with no labels which are impossible to remember what to do with.”
To address this negativity, he said, his company frequently installs systems whose moods and scenes that are called up by contact closure toggle switches rather than keypads.
There was general agreement that simple interfaces were important, whatever form they might take. Shaw recalled a client discussing a shooting lodge project. “He said to me, ‘I only want two scenes in every room: “going out” and “hung over”’. Just because you can get ten buttons on a keypad, it doesn’t mean you want ten buttons.”
Buddle singled out two keypads that had proved popular with his clients. One was a Lutron keypad that also featured temperature and audio controls: “Aesthetically that seems to work for everybody – interior designers, wives, husbands. Everything is here in one keypad.” The other was the Philips Dynalite keypad with integral OLED display.
Dynalite’s Philippe Regnier added: “The display enables features – otherwise you get into complex operating procedures to get to the function you want. With the display you get native feedback, so it makes the understanding of the feature easy.”
