I installed my first "smart" switch in 2010. It was a Leviton Z-Wave switch. Back then, getting automated "smart home" stuff was expensive, hard, and complicated. I was forced to do this as a result of some wacky wiring in my kitchen that required I have a smart keypad that can turn two lights on at once. The Leviton Viza RF+ products did the job for a number of years. But programming Z-Wave products stinks and interoperability is not perfect.

However, there has been a significant lighting change that required that I revisit much of my lighting: LED Light Bulbs. Lighting is the #1 consumer of energy in my home. We have over a hundred recessed lights in our home. Each room has 6-10 Par 30LN or Par38 bulbs each consuming 50W-90W of energy. Our kitchen and family room alone is about 1000W of energy for 10 hours per day. In a year that's about 3000kw of energy, roughly 15% of all my electrical usage or $400 a year. To light one room! I have been motivated to cut this down with LED bulbs to roughly 210w (vs 1000w). 

My quest for high quality replacement LEDs throughout the house meant all new dimmers. LEDs don't usually work with traditional dimmers and especially not my Leviton Z-Wave dimmers.

Around this time, Lutron had announced their Caseta "home" products. Lutron is an old name in custom lighting and makes most of the commercial and high end products in the market. They are all branded and packaged differently, but customer builders will use products like Radio RA2 and HomeWorks (for new construction). In fact, the way that new homes are getting wired resembles nothing like how current homes are wired. Lutron HomeWorks allows you to discretely control each load in the house through a central control panel. 120V is run to every light and Cat5 cable is run to each switch or dimmer as a "home run" back to the electrical panels. From there the nonsense of multi-way lighting (3, 4, 5 way) is eliminated along with all the head scratching ways of doing the wiring. It also means a lot less copper 14 gauge wire running all over the place. 

For me though, I went with the do-it-yourself Caseta system. Most of the components can be purchased from Amazon and the entire system is HomeKit compatible, meaning you can say "Siri turn off the Main Floor" and she will turn off all the lights on the main floor. Other neat thing I can do, are dim the lights to 60% when the TV remote is used to turn on the TV. I can also use IFTTT recipes to trigger other remote actions. Siri is really powerful here with lots of easy to use commands. You can even dim lights for movie night or guests.

So how do you get started?

1. You need enough electrical knowledge to replace dimmers and switches, including finding the neutral wire and connect that to some of the switches.
2. You need to have a basic understanding of 3-way circuits although you will not be using them as Lutron accomplishes 3-way to using small little remotes that run off batteries that replace your old 3-way switch
3. A Lutron Smart Bridge
4. Some Dimmers, Switches and Remotes