The Dimmer is Dead, but the Future Is Under Control

Once a residential designer’s go-to solution, the traditional dimmer may now be a roadblock to progress.

By David K. Warfel

I learned quite a bit on my first job in architectural lighting twenty plus years ago, like how to run lighting calculations and why a ceiling uniformity ratio was important. I was taught by more experienced designers to build mockups to test solutions and to triple-check your specs before sending them out for construction. I learned how to minimize glare from a double triple-tube CFL downlight and how to specify linear indirect T5 fluorescent in continuous rows.

And I learned that the dimmer was the lighting designer’s best friend.

The halogen MR16 was our lamp of choice for residential and hospitality designs, praised for its high quality of light, six-thousand-hour lamp life and easy dimmability. We encouraged clients to put every single one of them on a dimmer so we could set the light just right and touted the energy savings and lamp-life-extending benefits of dimming.

Then progress happened, and the MR16 was relegated to the trash heap of history as a short-lived, energy-hogging, heat-producing dinosaur. In came the compact fluorescent, slow to warm up and magnanimous in its wide distribution of light. We ran towards metal halide PAR20s for commercial settings but struggled to find a good replacement for the MR16. LEDs pushed us into the future once again, this time offering better optical control and the smaller form factors we love.

Sadly, we still struggle to dim our lights with the same smoothness, reliability, and gentle color shifting that was so easy with MR16s. We use a lot of warm-dim fixtures, especially those that mimic the dimming curve of halogen, but there is often a bit of anxiety while we wait to see how the fixture will perform with the controls, despite manufacturers on both sides testing hundreds and thousands of combinations.

All throughout this time we, as an industry, did our best to put a positive spin on our technological advances. I can remember convincing an investment banking firm to use compact fluorescent downlights throughout eight floors of new office space. I recall encouraging clients to use “dimmable” LEDs long before they could visibly dim below 40% or replicate an incandescent curve.

Over in the parallel world of theater and entertainment, I noticed a seismic shift years before it was felt in architecture. The dimmer was dying. LEDs were more quickly adopted in theater and entertainment for their ease of color-changing, a high-demand feature that was previously extremely difficult. So, somewhere around fifteen years ago, I designed a lighting system for a theater with zero dimmers. In an era where I was regularly designing shows with three hundred or more dimmers, this was a big change.

The most forward-thinking theatrical dimming manufacturers did something previously unthinkable: they started moving beyond dimmers. The bread-and-butter of their industry was drying up overnight, and we can see parallels today in architecture.

At home, though, the dimmer is still around. It may be time for it to retire and play golf.

Really good lighting at home – light that will help our clients live better lives – simply cannot work on a traditional dimmer. I sometimes wonder if warm-dim, still our most common spec in residential projects, will end up analogous to the compact fluorescent and my Prius hybrid: technologies that help us take a step forward and then quickly give way to something better. And warm-dim bulbs are disappearing from the marketplace quickly, making it harder and harder to get nice warm light at home. I suspect socket saturation is mainly to blame for the disappearance of so many warm-dim options, but I think we made some marketing decisions that also doomed the bulbs. Before warm-dim was available, we marketed dimmable LEDs and swept the fact that most look ugly and gray when dimmed under the proverbial rug. And, we cast warm-dim lamps as a throwback to incandescent days instead of selling it as sunset-dimming. Some people like the old incandescent bulbs, but everyone likes a good sunset. And with the death of warm-dim bulbs comes a need for something better, something that goes beyond warm-dimming, like wide-range tunable white. Something that inherently needs a different – and better – method of operation.

The problem is figuring out what that something better will be.

The moment we step beyond warm-dimming fixtures, we find ourselves in a land of tunable or dynamic light capable of far more than the beloved MR16. Now we can have that nice, clean white of halogen when we want it, the soft warm of incandescent later in the evening, and the crisp cool white of sunlight midday. We can have it all, if we can control it.

We are currently giving homeowners a tough choice: pull out your phone every time you want to change your lights, buy an expensive control system that does it for you, fiddle with awkward controls on a wall, squash your privacy concerns and talk to a smart speaker, or give up on the advancements of modern light. I have color-tuning lighting in some rooms of my house, but I cannot convince my family to use it. It’s just too much effort. But a shift to tunable technologies will happen – the science of our wellbeing will demand it.

Dimmers alone cannot deliver the wide range of intensities, directions, and hues of natural light that we need every day.

I would like to see a new dimmer, something as easy to operate as the stalwart rotary dimmer, as intuitive as a light switch, and as intelligent as a smart phone. I have a few ideas for how it might work, but there are likely those reading this with far more skill than I in the engineering and product development realm. I would love to see what you invent. I suspect it will be wireless, perhaps Matter-enabled for cross-platform compatibility, easy to install and retrofit, and, of course, come in trendy finishes. It will not be a dimmer – not really – but it will replace the incandescent dimmer with something more.

Why wireless? As a society, we gladly trade convenience for quality every day. Think cell phones, which drop calls more than a land line but fit in our pocket. Think Wi-Fi, slower than ethernet but easier to get on the couch. Think wireless charging, less efficient, perhaps, but oh so effortless. I believe wired lighting controls are better, even in homes, but I have a hard time imagining that they have much of a future. Add in the evolution of mesh networks, where control memory and function are decentralized, and you have several compelling reasons to move beyond wired controls.

The next dimmer should not be a proprietary solution, where you are stuck beholden to one manufacturer for the decades you own your home. I suspect it will not be DALI or DMX, though both have their place in luxury homes and commercial projects. Perhaps it will be hot-swappable by the consumer, not requiring an electrical contractor every time an upgrade or replacement is desired.

The next dimmer may integrate with voice assistants, but will also provide a convenient, reliable point of control on the wall. Until voice is universal and ubiquitous, until you can walk into a rental or a hotel room or your neighbor’s house and turn on the lights with your voice reliably, everywhere, every time, there will be good reason to have a dimmer on the wall.

Finally, the next dimmer needs to be affordable if we are to help our friends and neighbors get better light at home. The next dimmer cannot be $300, but should cost $30 instead. We have all the technology and knowledge to make this happen, we just need to work together.

Can we work together? Or will competition keep us from developing open-source solutions that benefit humanity and the planet with interoperability and redundancy? If Apple and Google can come to the table and develop a standard for smart homes, after pushing their own standard for years, we can do it, too.

Just like we need a new downlight, we need a new dimmer to get lighting at home under control. Our wellbeing depends on it. ■

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