★Residential · Service

Smart lighting installation · Kansas City.

One lighting system for the whole house, on both sides of the state line. IntegrateIT designs, installs, programs and supports whole-home lighting control across the Kansas City metro from 15108 Glenwood Ave in Overland Park — Lutron Caseta, RadioRA 3 and HomeWorks QSX, and Control4 lighting where the house is already on Control4. Lutron Certified Installer, Control4 Platinum Dealer with a Control4 Certified Showroom, Crestron Elite Partner and CEDIA member, so the platform we recommend is the one the house needs. Daniel designs every system the company installs and walks every project. Phone: (913) 804-7575 or office@integrateit.tech.

Below: what changes when every load in the house is on one system, why the state of the walls decides the platform rather than the size of the budget, how the Lutron tiers and Control4 lighting fit together instead of competing, how scenes and keypads get designed at house scale, what a lighting design meeting actually covers, and the order a project runs in from the first walk to the tuning visit a month after you move back in.

One processor, every load, one vocabulary

A whole-home lighting system is not a pile of smart switches that happen to share a brand. It is one processor holding one model of the house: every circuit named, every room grouped, one astronomical clock, one set of scenes and one button vocabulary that means the same thing on the third floor as it does in the basement. That single fact is what people are buying, and it is also the thing that is hard to retrofit later — you can add dimmers to a house forever, but you cannot add coherence to it afterwards.

The practical test is the fourth room. A house with app-controlled bulbs in one room is delightful. The same house with them in four rooms is a house where nobody remembers which app owns the hallway, and the switches get used instead. A controlled house goes the other way: each new room inherits a structure that already exists, so the fifteenth room is easier to add than the second. Everything else on this page — the platform, the wiring, the keypads — is in service of that.

It also means lighting is where the rest of the house gets its cues. The lighting processor is the thing that knows what time it is, whether anyone is home, and what the sun is doing, which is why shades, exterior lighting, the goodnight routine and the alarm all end up hanging off it rather than off their own separate schedules.

Retrofit or new construction: the walls decide

Almost every lighting conversation in this metro forks the same way, and it forks on access to the wall rather than on the ambition of the project. Most of what we install goes into finished houses.

• A finished house, staying finished. Wireless dimmers replace the switches already sitting in the existing boxes and talk to a processor, so a whole-home retrofit is an electrical job plus a programming job rather than a construction one. No ceilings come down and no plaster gets patched. The two things we check on the walk are whether the switch boxes carry a neutral conductor — many pre-1970 boxes do not, which rules some dimmers out entirely — and whether each room has enough separately switched circuits to make a scene mean anything.
• A house that is already open. A kitchen gut, a primary-suite addition or a whole-floor renovation buys you the hardwired option for the part of the house that is open, and it is worth taking even if the rest of the house stays wireless. Mixed systems are normal and behave as one system to the people living in them.
• New construction. The lighting system stops being a product and becomes a trade with a place in the schedule: a panel location agreed with the electrician, home-run wiring during rough-in, keypad boxes set before drywall, and commissioning after trim. The decisions that are cheap here — how many separately controlled loads a room gets, where the keypads land, whether shade power goes to the windows — are the expensive ones later.
• A house with someone else’s system already in it. An orphaned or half-finished lighting system is its own project: we audit what is there, recover or rebuild the programming, and take the system on. It is closer to the takeover work than to a new install, and it is usually cheaper than starting over.

If you are building or gutting, lighting belongs in the same conversation as the rest of the low-voltage scope rather than in its own — see new-construction low-voltage, where lighting homeruns, keypad boxes and shade power get coordinated against the builder’s schedule instead of after it.

How the platforms fit together, not which one wins

Four names come up in every metro lighting conversation, and they are not four competitors in a line. Three of them are Lutron tiers that answer the question “how is the dimming done?”, and the fourth is a control platform that answers “what else does the button do?”. Getting that distinction straight is most of the decision.

• Lutron Caseta — wireless, small, and genuinely good inside its limits. A guest house, a pool house, a condo, or one part of a larger home that wants three reliable scenes and no project.
• Lutron RadioRA 3 — the wireless whole-home tier, and where most finished houses in this metro land. Keypads, scenes, timeclock, shades and full integration with a control system above it, without opening a wall.
• Lutron HomeWorks QSX — hardwired, with the dimming modules in a panel in the mechanical room instead of in the wall boxes. What keeps very high zone counts predictable, and what we specify on new builds and full renovations.
• Control4 lighting — Control4’s own keypads and dimmers, which make sense when the house is already on Control4 for audio, video and climate and the owner genuinely wants one vendor, one app and one dealer across everything.

From there the architecture is one of two shapes. The two-stack pattern puts Lutron underneath for lighting and shades and Control4 or Crestron above it for audio, video, climate and security — each platform doing the half it is best at, one app on the phone, keypads on the wall that do not care which system is answering. It is what we recommend for most larger homes. The single-stack pattern runs lighting on the control platform itself: fewer moving parts, one dealer, one support path, and the right answer for a mid-sized house that wants simplicity more than it wants the last sliver of dimming refinement. We install both, and the honest comparison is written up in Lutron HomeWorks vs Control4 lighting and RadioRA 3 vs HomeWorks.

Scenes and keypads, designed at house scale

A scene is a decision made once so nobody has to make it again, and at house scale the design problem is restraint rather than capability. The system can hold hundreds of scenes. A family can hold about six, and only if the same six words mean the same thing everywhere.

So we design the vocabulary before the buttons. Four scenes earn their place in nearly every house: the path from the car to the kitchen, the main level taken down to a level you can hold a conversation in, everything downstairs off on the way to bed, and the house made presentable before people arrive. Those four get the same names and the same button positions on every keypad in the house, so a guest, a housekeeper or a teenager reaching for a wall in the dark finds the same thing in every room. Room-specific scenes sit underneath that standard layer, never on top of it.

Keypad placement follows the same discipline: one at each way in and out of a room people arrive in, and none on the walls nobody walks past. Engraving happens after the plan is settled rather than before, because an engraved button is a commitment — which is also the argument for spending twenty minutes at the design center with the samples in your hands before anything is ordered. That side of the decision, plus finishes, plate lines and the city’s own housing quirks, is the Overland Park smart lighting page, with the neighborhood-level version at lighting control in Overland Park.

Where lighting meets the rest of the house

Lighting is the layer everything else leans on, so the keypad by the door is rarely doing only one thing. One press takes the room down, drops the motorized shades to the position the sun calls for, steps the whole-house audio back, and — on the way to bed — arms the house and closes the exterior down to the path lights. Because the shades run on the lighting processor rather than beside it, they inherit the same clock and the same sun-tracking positions instead of keeping a second schedule that slowly disagrees with the first.

Two constraints are regional rather than architectural, and both are worth knowing before you design anything. The first is daylight: Kansas City sits far enough north that a June evening and a December one are close to five hours apart, so anything set against fixed clock times looks wrong for half the year. Everything we commission runs against an astronomic timeclock keyed to local sunrise and sunset instead. The second is color: a dimmed LED gets darker but not warmer, which is why a beautifully dimmed house can still feel wrong at six in the morning. Tunable fixtures are the answer to that one, and they have their own guide — circadian lighting, explained.

What the design meeting covers

Every project starts with a walk of the house or the plans, at no cost, with Daniel. On a finished home it takes an hour or two; on a set of construction drawings it is usually a longer sitting with the architect or designer in the room. Either way it covers the same ground, in this order:

• How the house is actually used. Which doors people come in, where the evening happens, who gets up first and who goes to bed last. Scenes are written from this, not from the floor plan.
• Room by room, what is switched today and what should be. Islands, perimeter cans, pendants, art, undercabinet and exterior each want their own zone; a room where all of it is on one switch has one look and can only ever have one.
• The fixtures themselves. What is in the ceiling now, what the designer is specifying, and whether those drivers dim cleanly. This is the single most common cause of a system that disappoints, and it is a fixture question rather than a control question.
• Keypad locations and count, marked on the plan, then trimmed. Followed by finishes and the engraving list once the scene vocabulary is settled.
• Shades, and whether they are in this phase. On new construction we routinely pull shade power to openings nobody has committed to yet — it is the cheapest line item on the job and it keeps the choice open for a decade.
• Access and phasing. Where wire can be run, which rooms are in scope now, and what the later phases need reserved for them today.
• The written proposal. A fixed price for equipment, labor and timeline after the walk — not a range by email. What moves the number is covered in what drives the cost of Lutron HomeWorks.

How a lighting project runs

A retrofit and a new build run the same phases in a different rhythm. A wireless whole-home retrofit is usually a handful of days with the electrical work and the programming happening together; a hardwired system on a new build spreads across the construction schedule and lands in three separate visits.

• Design and documentation. The load schedule, the keypad plan and the engraving list, issued as drawings the electrician and the builder work from.
• Rough-in, on a new build. Homeruns pulled to the panel location, keypad boxes set, shade power run. This is the phase that cannot be redone later.
• Trim. Panel populated, dimmers and keypads installed, the system brought up and every load identified and named against the schedule.
• Commissioning, after the fixtures are lamped. Low-end trim set per load, scene levels set in the actual room with the actual fixtures, the timeclock keyed to local sunrise and sunset. You cannot set a level for a room you have not seen lit, which is why this is last and never first.
• The walkthrough. Every keypad, in every room, with whoever is going to press them. Changes made on the spot rather than written on a list.
• The tuning visit. A few weeks after you have lived with it. This is where the scenes stop being ours and start being yours, and it is included.

The step-by-step of the wider process — proposal, schedule, change orders, as-builts and the service-ticket response — is written up in how a project runs. Every install carries a five-year workmanship warranty, the equipment carries its manufacturer warranty, and you have our support for as long as you own the system. If the system in your house is already installed and misbehaving, that is the Lutron service and repair path instead; our Lutron credentialing is on the Lutron HomeWorks page.

Questions every Kansas City owner asks