Controls

  Parks Associates’ 2026 State of Connected Home report says the connected home market is shifting away from selling devices and toward owning the customer relationship through data, services, and recurring revenue. The biggest growth opportunities are in platform control, AI-driven home experiences, security, and home energy management, while trust and privacy remain the main [...]

  By Gary Satanovsky, Product Design and Marketing Manager, NuWatt Lighting Since the earliest days of electric light, illumination has played a central role in keeping people and property safe after dark. Along the way, security lighting became governed by a simple, seemingly intuitive principle: brighter spaces are safer spaces. And while that assumption – higher [...]

    By Szymon Slupik, President & CTO, Silvair Energy saving is the primary feature of lighting control systems. The concept is well known: dim the lights if there is enough sunlight (daylight harvesting controls) or turn the lights off when there are no people in the room (occupancy / vacancy – based controls). The [...]

  Briteswitch has pulled together the latest rebate trends for Commercial Lighting Controls and EV Chargers, in separate articles. Rebate Trends For Commercial Lighting Controls Commercial lighting controls are moving from an add-on feature to a central part of rebate strategy as utilities push for deeper energy savings and look beyond simple LED retrofits. In [...]

  By C. Webster Marsh, Lighting Controls Designer, Sladen Feinstein Integrated Lighting Changing White Lighting: What is the End-User’s Experience? I have learned that one of the fastest ways to lose someone outside the lighting industry is to ask, ‘Do you want 2700K or 3500K?’ It is a perfectly normal question for us inside the [...]

  I find it hard to keep track of all the different ways that controls are evolving. Lately, I’ve noticed smart wall controls are getting significantly more feature-rich. A few examples are below. The Keilton+autani IWS102 & DWS102 by LiteTrace Brands Keilton+autani by LiteTrace Brands has transformed standard wall switches into intelligent control hubs that [...]

  The Association for Smarter Homes & Buildings (ASHB) surveyed 308 building owners, operators, IT leaders, and facility managers, in the US and Canada, about trends in smart buildings. The results are in ASHB’s report, 2025 Smart Building Trends & Technology Adoption. The document’s key finding is that smart building technology has moved from experimentation [...]

  Design Lights Consortium (DLC) has released the Networked Lighting Controls (NLC) Requirements V5.2 Draft 1. DLC laid out four goals for Version 5.2: Highlighting emerging capabilities in networked lighting controls. Present new system capabilities, particularly integrations with thermostats to save energy and improve building performance. Strengthening the role of NLC in energy efficiency programs [...]

  The TALQ Consortium’s latest release, version 2.7.0 of the Smart City Protocol, isn’t about any flashy new features, but rather making smart outdoor lighting systems easier to integrate, certify, and scale across vendors. For the lighting industry, the big message is that interoperability is becoming more standardized and more demanding, which should favor manufacturers [...]