On August 22, 2016 at 22:14, cgav said...
I've been doing lighting control and lutron for over 10 years now. I still have brain farts every time I go to program scenes. Customers have no idea what they want and it's up to me to make something usable until they figure out what they want.
What do you guys program as your scenes when your sales department sells way too many keypads? Like 20 in a 4 bedroom home. I'm not even joking.
Customers don't have any idea of what they want, they look to us to figure it out for them. While 20 keypads in a 4 bedroom home may seem like a lot (I don't think so), one thing I think we do is put too many scene buttons in those keypads. And mix up scene and load based programming. Then we hang pieces of paper on the wall and say 'Live with it a few months then we can come back and tweak it to the way you want.' Ugh.
I don't think people hire us to put buttons on walls and have them tell us how to program it, they hire us to make things simpler for them.
One thing that is confusing is mixing scene based and load based programming, unless of course a single load illuminates a room (eg: downlights down a hallway). Then mixing toggles and All Off's everywhere, which is sort of redundant.
Room
Adjacent Room
Load
Load
Load
Fan
All Off
Or the infamous There's a Button There So Program It With Something Logic, my personal favorite:
Hi - 99%'er Button
Medium - 1% of the time
Low - WTF?
Next Room - The Only Sensible Button
Load - Pick Me
Load - I Guess This One Too
All Off - Is this Room All Off or House All Off? Huh?
It's easy to program buttons. It's hard to make it super intuitive with the least amount of buttons necessary.
Kitchen
Dining
Hallway
Fans
What could be easier than that? If you ask somebody if they want more or less choices they typically choose more choice. Choice is good, right? Well, when I'm walking around and turning on lights the only choice I want to have to make is that I want to turn on lights. How often am I going to choose 'Well, I think I want the ropes on, and maybe the Island cans too, but not the Dining Cans." Those are the customized party scenes that can be done in software or on a hidden 12 button command center somewhere else. I don't think single load buttons on all keypads is good thing. I think it gets overdone and causes users to have to make choices every time they want the damn lights on. Call it Technology Microaggressions.
My philosophy is you come out of the gate with a simple and very basic program and build up. Keep in mind the market I live in: 95% luxury vacation homes that are lived in part time. This greatly biases my philosophy. But I don't think it changes too much with homes that are 98% occupied. 95% of the time people just want to turn on the damn lights: putting extra buttons everywhere to satisfy the 5% or less of the time they feel like playing around doesn't make sense to me.
