Crestron’s Tunable LED Fixtures and Controls: The Right Lighting

Every four to six weeks, there’s an update sent to the Crestron Home platform. The updates are free and cover everything from remote power cycling to new configuration tools. There’s one part of the platform that has been a primary focus throughout 2022, however: tunable LED lighting fixtures and controls.

The fixtures themselves are a new product segment for Crestron, with options that include adjustable, wall wash, fixed frame, and pinhole fixtures. Form factors include square or round trims, all with multiple enclosure possibilities. Crestron will also be adding a bevy of third-party fixtures to the mix in the near future, all with native integration with the platform.

The hardware is what you’d expect from Crestron and its partners: These are elegant fixtures with clean lines and excellent fit and finish. But it’s what those fixtures can do once they’re installed that really creates a kind of magic.

Understanding Our Relationship to Light

Terms such as “wellness” and “human-centric (or bio-centric) lighting” get kicked around a lot. They’re not mere marketing terms, however. In fact, there’s a growing body of evidence that the right light — at the right time of day — can have some profound benefits for the 21st-century human. 

The hard truth is that humans spend most of their time indoors, away from the natural sunlight our ancestors evolved with for thousands upon thousands of years. The portion of any 24-cycle that we now spend inside is downright alarming. Between the home, the office, and the car, that figure is now approaching 93% in North America alone. And that, of course, means that our exposure to daylight is profoundly limited.

Light and its varying color temperatures and intensities are directly related to a hormone called melatonin, “a neurotransmitter-like substance that plays a vital role in regulating circadian rhythms, which in turn control sleeping patterns, hormone release, and body temperature, among many other human functions,” explained here by Livestrong. As noted in this article from Harvard, light triggers the release of melatonin in the human body, which can interfere with a person’s natural cycles of resting and wakefulness. 

The Human Rhythm

One answer to our lack of exposure to natural light is the tunable LED blub and its ability to change color temperature throughout the day, matching what’s called our “circadian rhythm.” While the impact of tunable artificial light on the sleep/wake cycle isn’t a precise science (yet), a growing number of respected experts in a variety of fields are studying the concept. The results are extremely promising: As Brian Stacy notes for the design and engineering collective Arup, there’s a growing belief among his colleagues that the benefits of circadian lighting are both physical and psychological as color temperatures shift to mirror natural daylight. That shift would begin with warmer temps in the morning that drift into the blue spectrum at midday – with the effect, hopefully, of sharpening the senses as would a bright sun in a clear blue sky — then warming again into twilight.

Stacy’s notions are beginning to look like they’re on point. An example: Over the last seven years, the U.S. government’s General Services Administration studied the impacts of daylight on workers and discovered — to oversimplify things a bit — that big windows weren’t enough. The GSA then conducted a study at the Federal Highway Administration Turner Fairbanks Highway Research Center in McLean, Virginia, and at the VA Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont, in which researchers gave workers “circadian effective” LED desktop lamps. Staffers there reported feeling less sleepy and more alert. The next phase of the research used tunable LEDs at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC, and yielded similar results.

An Indoor Solution

Tunable LED lighting — and its ability to respond not only to the time of day but also to the actual light that exists in nature — is a solution that can stretch well beyond a small desktop lamp. One can find a whole-home answer as part of the Crestron Home® OS. Crestron’s Circadian Rhythm feature creates a smooth curve of color temperature and intensity changes that align with natural sunlight.

“As 2022 has progressed, we’ve added updates to the Crestron Home platform that control and automate every aspect of the tunable LED fixture we offer,” says Jason Oster, director of product management (residential solutions) for Crestron. The latest update to the Crestron Home OS — 3.16 — rounds out that functionality. “Now, throughout the day, if you have your tunable LED set to circadian mode, your ambient lighting will cycle from warm, soft light to more intense blue light as midday approaches,” says Oster.

“You can also augment that automation with specific color temperature points throughout the day,” he adds. “Suppose you're an early riser — but the sun is not up yet. You can mimic the kind of light that would filter in through the windows at sunrise well before dawn.” 

Sensing the Sun

There’s another level of automation at work in this update: the platform now includes SolarSync® sensors that “read” outdoor color temperature and tunes the interior lighting to match. “Those sensors come with a variety of features that ensure reliability,” says Oster. One example: The devices include a small heater to melt any ice or snow that might build up on the lens in colder climates.

A lighting solution that mimics the ebb and flow of daylight needn’t fill every fixture, though — these tunable LEDs work best in ambient lighting applications in rooms where they make sense. Accent lighting that highlights an artwork or a textured wall, lighting that traces architectural features need not follow the sun — and rooms such as half-baths or home cinemas don’t require this specific functionality. But when used judiciously in areas of the home that see the most use and occupancy, tunable lighting is an integral part of a wellness package that dramatically improves the 90-plus-percentage of time we spend inside.

Intuitive Control

“Throughout all of these Crestron Home updates, we’ve prioritized developing the most intuitive sets of controls we could create — both for the client and the dealer handling configuration,” says Oster.

This update also offers homeowners a different — and much more intuitive — way to control the lighting in any part of the house. “Instead of drilling down into an individual room to see if something’s on or off, this gives the user a much broader picture,” says Oster.

The new presentation gives the client a grid of images that relate to various parts of the home — first floor, second floor, and basement, for example. “The dealer can organize these however the house is laid out,” Oster explains, “and at a group level, I can see that, say, at least one light is on upstairs. I can just press a button that turns off all the lights in that part of the home.” The images representing each zone are collapsible so a user can see if something’s on in a particular location and shut down that area completely.

Dealer Design, Dealer Benefits

There’s a reason this whole-home lighting control update is image-heavy — as Oster explains, UX solutions that lean on text are never as successful as those that are image reliant. (There’s a reason that the apps on your phone, from email to Spotify, are easily recognizable icons with tiny text beneath.)

The look of the update is a direct result of dealer feedback, says Oster. “We worked with dealers for months on this thing,” he says. “We thought we had the layout looking great with big, beautiful images — nope. Our dealers wanted smaller pictures, more rooms, a much more comprehensive control experience.”

“There’s one more thing that I find very interesting: This is an example where Crestron Home gains more value overnight,” Oster adds. “The end user gets the new app on the app store automatically. Their touch panels will actually update in the middle of the night, and poof, they will get this feature.”

“That’s great for homeowners, but I’d argue it’s even better for dealers,” he says. “To begin with, you don’t need to roll a truck. Furthermore, we know from talking to dealers that 97% or so of their jobs come from referrals — and if a homeowner’s delighted with the sudden appearance of a free new feature like this, it will certainly generate word-of-mouth buzz.”

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