Light control is the ability to adjust the amount of daylight and electric light in a room or throughout your whole home. With Lutron, you can adjust the amount of daylight with electronically controlled shades and drapes, electric lights with dimmers and switches. And you can conveniently control it all with keypads, sensors, and other light control devices to create the perfect balance of daylight and electric light to suit your lifestyle.

What are the benefits?

Having the ability to create a range of light levels throughout your home, rather than simply turning your lights full on, adds convenience, creates ambiance, adds a “wow” factor, and saves energy.

Benefits of Integrating Radio RA2:

Add Convenience To Your Daily Life.

You’ll have the right light when you need it, where you want it to create just the right mood or ambiance.

You’ll find there is more to lighting than simply on and off to add “wow” to your home.

You’ll be able to create lighting scenes for a specific activity, such as entertaining friends or watching a movie in your media room.

Save energy when you dim a standard halogen or incandescent light bulb by 25%. On average you’ll save about 20% of your energy consumption. Dim more, and you’ll save even more. You’ll also extend the life of your light bulbs.

You can try out an Interactive light control demo from Lutron here.

Don’t forget…. Motorized Window Shades help save energy, too. We will discuss that in a later article.

Ask Dan About Radio RA2

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The new construction housing market has slowed. Remodels and retrofit projects are still vibrant. Green is the ultimate buzz word.

The concept of this project was to create a home theater in combination with a green component, the choice of which was solar panels. The power developed by the panels would more than offset the usage of the theater. We chose to use four Sharp 175 watts panels. These produce 700 watts per hour, which was tied into the main panel of the house. No battery is required because the entire house draws off the solar panel not just the theater system. Each geographic area gets varying amounts of usable sunlight. (Please Note: there is a map with usable hours of sunlight for every US city location is in this binder.)

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The theater consists of the following items;
a front projector, a 100 inch screen, six speakers including a subwoofer, a blu-ray player, an AV receiver, a green power conditioner, a universal remote control, an Ipod dock, HDMI cables, and two rows of theater chairs to accommodate six people. We chose to use a green power conditioner that turns off all items that would normally draw power in a standby configuration thereby conserving energy. The leather seats were made with a unique method that does not require the use of chromium in the tanning process. This is the “green element” of the seating.

The solar panels can produce approximately 22,000 watts weekly. (700watts per hour X 4.5 usable hours X 7 days in a week) Based on the combined power consumption of the theater, a family could enjoy 16 hours per week without using any electrical power from the grid. Any less viewing would send power back to the grid and diminish the accumulated usage of the entire house for that month.

An added benefit is the federal tax credit. Currently 30% of the price of the solar panels, inverter, roof rack, cabling, and installation earn the homeowner a deduction of 30% from their federal tax obligation. In this case the solar system priced at $5,880 including installation, which entitles the homeowners to a tax credit of $1,764.

The retail price of the theater components including the seating is $21702. A eight percent discount was offered to the buyer. The price of the gear was $19,995. Installation of the theatre was $3,000. The construction of the riser and carpet was $780. The total price the package installed was $29, 575 before the tax credit.

Please follow the link below to discover additional local rebate and incentives information for virtually all communities in North America:

http://www.dsireusa.org/index.cfm?EE=0&RE=1

Thank You,

Home Theater Specialists of America

Check out this video of the complete build.

* For more information on the Guiltless Green Home Theater, go to htsa.com.
* Article courtesy of HE Magazine

Ask Wayne About Incorporating Solar Energy

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One area integrators might not have considered is performance-oriented decor options for cinema and media rooms. We’ve covered the benefits of acoustic treatments in previous Custom Corner instalments. Star ceiling panels, as well as fibre optic lighting in general, are decor accents that add enormous visual appeal to a home cinema.

Fibre optic lighting, whether simple or complex, has come on strong over the last couple of years. Most systems can be sourced locally through wholesale outlets that cater to electricians, so pick up a few catalogues and browse the potential offerings. One option, for instance, is rope lighting that can delineate steps and risers in a darkened room. Most are dimmable in the same way as conventional light fixtures, and thus are controllable by your control system. The visual appeal they create can be stunning, but the products themselves can be quite inexpensive, so think of them more as a value-added approach to adding labour dollars to the project.

Bear in mind that some off-the-shelf fibre optic and rope light products are entirely low voltage and just plug in to an outlet, while others connect directly to the home’s 120v AC and need to be connected by a licensed electrician. Choose the products accordingly.

Possibly the most dramatic decor accessory that integrators can add into an installation is a star ceiling. In fact, several dealers across the country have recently installed iSky star panels into their demo rooms, and the response from clients has been hugely positive.

Acoustically absorbent, iSky panels are configured in 24 x 24″, 30 x 30″ and 48 x 48″ square pieces that can be surface-mounted to finished ceilings or cloud-mounted below any ceiling, as well as 24 x 24″ drop in panels for suspended ceilings. The panels can be easily cut to accommodate lighting fixtures, smoke alarms, and such. Triangle and quarter round end piece panels with stars are also available to accommodate odd-shaped rooms.

The big advantage of iSky panels, according to the dealers who’ve installed them, is their simplicity. Older star ceilings required manually running individual fibres back to a home run location. It’s difficult to imagine a more tedious task! The iSky panels connect via a two-conductor connector, and up to 50 panels can be run from a single three-amp, 12V power supply. In dealer demo rooms, I’ve seen the finished star ceiling turned on and off from the touch panel that controls the cinema, and the first reaction is: “Cool!”

The simplicity of the system makes it accessible to clients with a broad range of budgets.

Another new product from iSky is an LED strip lighting called URay. It comes in flexible 12″ low-voltage strips and an assortment of corner pieces, along with accessories to create highlight glow effects around the perimeter of iSky panels or on their own, as accent lighting. They come in blue, red, amber and cool white. And a dimmer module is available.

It goes without saying that custom installations used to be bread and butter for integrators. But jobs like hanging a flat panel TV have become commoditized, with the resulting margins shrinking. Consequently, evolving integration businesses should seek new categories that will give them an edge, differentiate them from competitors, and add profit. Think outside of the box, and give added niceties like decor accessories a chance.

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