Lighting: The call for connected home

Still in an evolutionary stage, the connected home category is unquestionably a bright area of growth for the lighting industry.

But this category is also full of moving parts, and compatibility and educating the consumer are among the challenges.

The lighting industry needs to adjust its thinking on how to approach connected home, said Terry McGowan, director of engineering and technology for the American Lighting Association. Previously, the industry focused on the decorative aspect, but this new category is about how people react to it. “It has to be something that grabs you,” like the entertainment and fitness categories, he said.

People have to see how it will make their lives easier, McGowan added, such as having the lights turn on automatically when you’re walking down a hallway. “The question is: How complicated will it be” to implement in a home?

But the good news is that consumers are “finally talking about lighting and what lighting can do in their homes,” said Peter Romaniello of Conceptual Lighting, and the industry has to educate consumers on the amazing things that can be done once you start to control it.

However, the lighting industry “consistently takes the approach of cutting quality in order to keep costs extremely low,” Romaniello said. People generally don’t value lighting, otherwise consumers and general contractors wouldn’t be putting the “absolute cheapest quality recessed lights into a custom or semi-custom home.”

And in an area like the connected home, a product needs to work 100% of the time “or people will lose faith in it and not use it,” Romaniello said, which is why people will spend $800 on an iPhone instead of a $200 on a knockoff.

Compatibility is essential, said Erik Anderson, national sales manager, Lutron Electronics. All connected home products should work with the big brands — Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung — as preferences range not just from household to household but sometimes from person to person.

Wider adoption in homes is on its way, due to new home construction, Anderson added. In the commercial industry, the connected home trend is moving rapidly, he said. Builders are putting that technology into new homes, which will be followed by a ripple effect to existing homes.

Li-Fi — the lighting equivalent of Wi-Fi — is another development in the commercial industry that could eventually make its way to residential, said McGowan, where the LED light in a system acts as radio waves, and could be installed in rooms where the Wi-Fi signal is weak.

Lighting has a unique place in the connected home, as people already understand it, McGowan said. Consumers might not need smart refrigerators, but they do need light.