★Service · Overland Park

Smart lighting installer · Overland Park.

Light that changes with the day, from keypads that match the hardware. IntegrateIT installs Lutron and Control4 smart lighting across Overland Park and the Kansas City metro from 15108 Glenwood Ave: Lutron Caseta, RA3 and HomeWorks QSX. Lutron Certified Dealer, Control4 Platinum Dealer and Crestron Elite Partner, so we recommend the platform that is right for your home. Daniel walks every project. Call (913) 804-7575.

Below: why the keypad on the wall decides whether a lighting system gets used, the honest case for each of the three Lutron tiers, why Overland Park is really two different lighting jobs depending on which side of the city you are on, what actually causes the flicker everyone blames on the dimmer, and how to program scenes that still make sense in January.

The keypad is the product

Lighting is the one system in a house that every person touches, every day, usually without looking at it. That is the whole design brief. An app is a fine second way in and a terrible only way in — a guest will not download it, a housekeeper will not use it, and a teenager coming in at midnight will hit whatever is nearest the door. So the measure of a lighting system is not how many scenes it can hold. It is whether the person walking into a dark room finds the right button in the dark.

Which is why the keypad conversation happens early here, and why it is not a Lutron-only conversation. Lutron keypads win most rooms on finish depth and on engraving — a button that reads Entertain, routed at the factory rather than marked with a sticker that yellows. Control4 Lux keypads and dimmers are the right call when the house is already on Control4 and the owner wants one vendor across lighting, audio and everything else. Crestron keypads earn their place where a single press has to carry timing, conditions and other subsystems with it. Moorgen keypads are the design-led answer, glass and metal faces for rooms where the plate is part of the millwork. All four are on our roster, and the samples sit on a wall at the Glenwood Ave design center.

The trade-off nobody warns you about is button count. A six-button keypad with the right six things on it beats a ten-button keypad with everything on it, because a keypad you have to read is a keypad you stop using. We start at four scenes per main room and add only what the family asks for after living with it.

Three tiers, and the honest case for each

There is no best tier — only the one that matches the state of the walls and the ambition of the house. Picking above it wastes money; picking below it produces a system that fights you.

• Caseta. Wireless, small, inexpensive, and genuinely good at what it does. Right for a guest house, a pool house, a finished basement apartment, or a home that wants three reliable scenes and no project. Trade-off: limited zone count, a shallower finish range, and a ceiling on how far the programming can go. When someone wants lighting control in one part of the house and nothing else, we say Caseta and mean it.
• RA3. The wireless whole-home tier and the one most finished Overland Park houses land on. Dimmers replace the switches already in the boxes, so nothing opens and nothing gets patched, and you still get keypads, scenes, an astronomic timeclock, shades and full integration with Control4 or Crestron. Trade-off: the dimming hardware lives in the wall boxes, so a button controlling fifteen loads coordinates fifteen devices rather than one panel, and very large houses eventually feel that.
• HomeWorks QSX. Hardwired. The dimming modules sit in a panel in the mechanical room and every load runs home to it, which is what makes very high zone counts and one-button control of a whole floor behave predictably. It also puts the serviceable electronics in one place instead of behind dozens of wall plates. Trade-off: it needs open walls or a serious chase plan, and it is the largest of the three commitments. On a new build or a full renovation it is what we specify.

Overland Park is two different lighting jobs

This city runs a long way north to south and the housing changes underneath you as you go, which changes the lighting job more than anything a homeowner would guess. The older neighborhoods in the north half are mid-century and post-war: fewer fixtures per room, switch boxes that frequently have no neutral conductor, plaster or older drywall, and lighting design that assumed a lamp on a table did most of the work. Those houses often need an electrical conversation before a control conversation, because you cannot scene-control a room that has one switched ceiling fixture in it.

The newer construction further south is the opposite problem. Two-story great rooms, open kitchen and hearth-room plans, and ceilings carrying a great many recessed downlights in several fixture types bought at different times. There is no shortage of light there. There is a shortage of organization: everything is on three-way switches nobody can remember, and the room has one look. That house needs the loads regrouped so the island, the perimeter cans, the pendants and the art each land on their own zone, and then four scenes on a keypad by the door.

The other constraint is regional rather than architectural. Kansas City sits far enough north that the difference between a June evening and a December one is close to five hours of daylight, and a lighting system set against fixed clock times looks wrong for half the year. Everything we set runs against an astronomic timeclock keyed to local sunrise and sunset instead, so the exterior lighting comes up with dusk in January the same way it does in July, and the morning scene does not blast a dark kitchen in midwinter. It costs nothing extra to do it that way and it is the single thing owners notice most in the first season.

The load is the hard part, not the dimmer

A flicker, buzz or dead-spot complaint is frequently a load problem wearing a dimmer costume. A modern downlight contains a driver, and the driver decides how the fixture behaves at the bottom of the dimming curve. A good dimmer behind a poor driver produces a fixture that stutters near the low end, drops out entirely at some point, or hums audibly in a quiet room. Nothing about that is fixed by buying a more expensive dimmer.

So the sequence is: identify what is actually in the ceiling, check it against the control manufacturer’s compatibility data, set the low-end trim per load rather than globally, and where the fixture is the fault, change the fixture and say so. Mixed batches are the Overland Park version of this — a room re-lamped over ten years has cans from three eras that will never dim to the same point. The honest answer there is a fixture budget, not a control budget, and we would rather say so before you sign than discover it at commissioning.

Scenes people actually press

A scene is a decision made once so nobody has to make it again. Four earn their keypad space in nearly every house: the path from the garage door to the kitchen, the main level taken down to a level you can hold a conversation in, everything off downstairs on the way to bed, and the house made presentable before guests arrive. The rest is preference, best discovered by living in the house a few weeks and then calling us.

Lighting is also where the rest of the house gets its cues. A press can take motorized shades down with the light level, step the whole-house audio back, and put the great room to sleep — the argument for keeping lighting and automation under one roof rather than two vendors. If you are still deciding between platforms, the head-to-head is in Lutron HomeWorks vs Control4 lighting and the tier comparison in RadioRA 3 vs HomeWorks. What drives the number is on the HomeWorks cost guide. The metro-wide version of this page — retrofit against new construction, how the Lutron tiers and Control4 lighting fit together, and how a lighting project runs — is smart lighting installation in Kansas City, and light that changes color temperature through the day is covered in circadian lighting, explained.

We are based at 15108 Glenwood Ave, in the same zip code as much of the work, so service calls and new-project walks come out of the same office. 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.

Common questions