Intecon,

I beleive everybody has provided with you with very good information but what ALan and ejfiii said in my opinion are very important. My company has closed about about 20 Howeworks systems for next year so I am quite familiar with the system. We also do Vantage Infusion which is very similar to Homeworks, and Centralite, not so similar. I am a firm beleiver that the programmer of these system should know everything abou them, including system design and infrastructure, but also read a lot and underastand about the programming capabilities of the system and learn to program these to their maximum cabalities. What ejfiii said is also very important: programming a button to do something is very easy, designing a system with proper functionality and capabilities almost to the maximum and also to the customer's requirements is not easy at all and requires experience. And as ejfii noted Lutron does not help you much in this. Fortunately Vantage Europe helped us a lot in these since the Infusion manual includes a lot of programming examples and house scenarios and system capabilities.

With a lighting control system of this level we try to do a lot more than just lighting control... e.g we control the shading systems (curtains, blinds, external blinds e.t.c), open and close doors with feedback on the keypads, switch on/off the hot water system, integrate the hot water pumps so they switch on automatically when you enter the bathrooms, install PIRs or pressure sensors around the beds so that lightpaths switch on to guide you to the wc or kitchen in the night and many more

This thread migh be useful to understand one of the various parameter in designing and programming a lighting system: [Link: remotecentral.com]