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Your Guide to High-End Accessories Page 8

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Moving up a step, there are dimmers that let you set up different lighting "scenes" for a room. For example, you can have scenes for entertaining, reading, relaxing, or watching movies or TV. You call up each scene by hitting one of several switches on the dimmer, or you can activate it by using a remote. Some dimmers also offer an adjustable turn-off time so you can get settled into watching a movie before the lights go down.

Dimmers are great for a single room. But if you want to control lighting in different parts of the house from a single place, there are various "powerline" systems that let you do just that, using your home's existing wiring. The X10 protocol, which has been around since the late '70s, sends radio signals along electrical wiring to communicate with other light switches. But X10 isn't always reliable and can suffer from interference.

Universal Powerline Bus (UPB) is more dependable than X10, and signals are sent digitally. Home Automation, Inc. (HAI) light-control systems support this standard. But UPB is susceptible to attenuation or signal loss in some applications. Another powerline system is SmartLabs' Insteon, which has better reliability than X10, in part because of a faster data rate. Plus, it's backwards compatible with X10 and can be added to older X10 systems.

RF Lighting Controls A fast-growing way for homeowners to gain more control over lighting - as well as integrate it with their home-entertainment gear - is with radio-frequency (RF) systems such as ZigBee and Z-Wave. Both standards have lined up companies to build compatible products around their open-platform systems. ZigBee is backed by Philips, Samsung, and Mitsubishi, while Z-Wave has Intel, lighting-accessory manufacturer Leviton, and Monster Cable in its camp. Rather than use a house's electrical wiring, ZigBee and Z-Wave send RF signals to compatible components via "nodes" in a mesh network. When a command is initiated (for example, to turn on a light), the signal passes from one node to the next until the task is completed. If a node is down or can't be "seen" by the RF signal, then the signal gets passed to the next node - much the way servers are used on the Internet.

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