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Have you ever wanted to automate your lights so that the porch light always turns on at sunset and back off at sunrise? Do you want your lights to alter their brightness depending on the time of day? How about having the climate control automatically turn on before you wake up – ensuring you wake up to an ideal temperature?

To install Control4 lighting keypads, a certified electrician only needs to take out the existing light switch and replace it with a Control4 equivalent. There are no wires to run at all! The lighting keypads communicate wirelessly back to the controller – and doing so adds automation potential to their capabilities.

All Control4 light dimmers, light switches and button keypads have tri-colour LEDs. This means you can change the colour based on certain events occurring. For example, you could have a keypad LED glow blue if the garage door is still open after 8pm.

What about tracking the time your son or daughter come home? If they arrived before their curfew, then the LED can be green. If they arrive after, it can glow red. What about having a master switch to turn off all lights in your home that you tap when you are about to leave?

With some assistance from a Control4 dealer, you will be able to come up with many more situations in which Control4 will have a beneficial impact on your life.

Introducing the Wireless Switch and Wireless Dimmer

With the introduction of the Control4® Wireless Switch and Wireless Dimmer, elegant and convenient lighting control is finally affordable for every home. Packed with intelligent features and dramatically less expensive than competitive brands, the Control4 lighting range marks the beginning of a new era for home automation.

With its seamless wireless connectivity and ease of installation, the Control4 Wireless Switch or Dimmer works beautifully in any home, whether it’s 100 years old or brand new. This radical simplicity makes the Switch truly unique, and allows more people to enjoy the benefits of an automated home. The Wireless Dimmer is approved for up to 1,000 watts of power and can handle just about any home lighting situation.

Introducing the Wireless Thermostat

The Control4® Wireless Thermostat makes it simple to add automated temperature control to any home. Featuring bi-directional communication and seamless integration with the Control4 home automation system, the Wireless Thermostat adds an impressive array of climate control functions that are accessible from any room in the home.

Benefits of using Control4 for Lighting & Climate Control

• Retrofittable: Lighting keypads and thermostat operate wirelessly. They simply use the existing wires from the existing traditional non-automated devices for power. This reduces both installation time and cost.
• Independent control: Control4 thermostats, lighting dimmers and switches can operate independently of a controller. The controller is simply used to give these devices automation capabilities.
• Variable LED colours: The colour of each LED on a keypad and light switch can be change independently whenever an event is triggered. It also allows you to better match these wall-mounted devices to the particular colour of the room they reside in.
• Climate control: How hard have you found it to program your climate control system? Control4 simplifies automation by giving you multiple methods to control the climate in your house – therefore making it easier and more convenient.
• Expandability: You can start by controlling one single light in your home, and expand it to automate and control up to 100 lights.
• On screen display: Turn lights and climate control on and off using the convenient on-screen display. The interface is now the size of your TV, plasma or projector.
• Robust wireless: ZigBee is used to ensure solid and trouble-free communications between automated devices. ZigBee is designed to work dependably by tolerating interference from the various electronic devices throughout you home.

How to connect lights to the Control4 Zigbee Network

Using the equipment that we installed in the home theatre, in combination with the whole home audio peripherals and now the lighting controls provides the freedom to automate wakeup scenes. The climate control system can turn on a few minutes before you wake up to ensure a comfortable temperature. Then at the specified time, the lights can gradually ramp on and you can wake up to your favourite TV station, radio station or music album. All this can help you wake up more relaxed, comfortable and ready to start your day in a positive way.

The technical diagram that we created shows one of the properties of the wireless lighting and climate control devices. They use ZigBee to communicate, which is a very recent and scalable wireless protocol. Devices that communicate using ZigBee automatically form into a "mesh network". This means that when one node/device is turned off, the other devices will automatically find another path to talk to each other. It also means that as you increase the number of ZigBee devices you put around your home the more robust your network becomes.