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Guest Commentary - The Increasing Demand for Dimming (29/8/2008)

By Paul Wafer, Rako Controls

Rako was founded in 2002 and has since grown to be the largest wireless lighting controls manufacturer in Europe. It employs 15 sales and operation staff in its newly-refurbished offices in Rochester, and 14 staff in the production facility in Sittingbourne.

We manufacture a system that is suitable for both residential and commercial systems, but our efforts to date have been towards the residential market, although products being developed currently will enable the system to be expended to manage the lighting control in large shopping centres, hotels and offices.

Growing demand for dimming

With advances in consumer electronics, the home automation market has widened, increasing the demand for easier to install and less 'budget busting' systems. People are spending more time at home, not only to work, but also with their families in a safe and secure environment. The 'home cinema experience' has now become commonplace, and the requirement to complete the drama you would normally find by visiting your local cinema, has led to increased demand for dimming systems. And once people experience the glamour and convenience of lighting controls in a home cinema environment, they often extend the system to other areas of their home.

Indeed over the past ten years, lighting control systems have developed from being reserved for the rich and famous, to being installed in the modest of homes. A simple system will comprise a few lighting circuits/channels being controlled from a push button scene lightswitch on the wall. This may be complimented by a universal remote control interface, so the home cinema system can also control the lighting.

But what about retrofitting?

In our experience, the increase in residential lighting control installations was being hampered by the complexity of installing what are predominantly commercial systems into domestic projects.

Furthermore, domestic properties are not wired for centralised dimming ‘racks’, so lighting controls are often discounted due to the cost and work involved in rewiring the property. It is the primary reason the Rako system was designed, we can tailor the dimming system to the project, rather than trying to tailor the project to the system!

We designed our products to be based upon retrofittable wireless technology, enabling any project, whether a single home cinema or an entire home, to be controlled, without the need to totally rewire the property. Although we have introduced more traditional 'dimmer rack' solutions, our core products remain the easy to install wireless type.

Beyond ordinary dimming

System integration is what separates a lighting control system from ordinary dimmers, and while I believe it’s important that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket, having the lighting, heating, CCTV and other controls individually on your wall, is likely to ruin any interior design. This is where a neat user interface can be the ‘glue’ to all the other systems in a property. For instance, Creston, AMX, and Living Control systems enable users to have a single neat touchscreen controller with access to all of the subsystems, but if the control system is switched off for any reason, you're not left without heat, light and security systems. Custom installers are trained to bring all these systems together and are a valuable asset to any build.

We produce various bridge products to help installers. For smaller installations, there is an infrared to RF gateway, for larger, more complex installations, we offer a bi-directional RS232 interface that can be used with audiovisual systems by companies such as Crestron and AMX.

Future challenges

Energy conservation and recycling are becoming the main focus for the whole electrical industry, and dimmers provide significant electrical energy savings while at the same time extending lamp life. I see the introduction of dimmable energy efficient lamps as the biggest challenge to the lighting industry - not only is the technology quite different to our trusty tungsten lamp, it also provides light fitting manufacturers with the challenge of providing fittings that accommodate these rather unsightly lamps.

With all the media hype over the 'credit crunch', it's difficult to predict what effect it will have on the higher-end residential CI business. One thing is certain though, effective and colourful lighting can make a huge difference to how a property looks, and if the crunch does start to take hold, up-specing a property with flexible home automation products is an ideal and cost-effective way of making a great first impression to prospective buyers!

Paul wafer is the Director of Rako Controls, manufacturer of state-of-the-art dimming technology, with distribution to all countries that have a 220-240V voltage supply.

www.rakocontrols.com