In the world of interior lighting, artwork needs to be specially lit if homeowners want to capture the essence of beauty the artist originally intended. Step outside and you’ll find that to be no different, only instead of the artist being Basquiat or Monet, it’s good old mother nature (and of course the architect that helped design the home). It’s this realization, WAC Director of Business Development-Integration at WAC and AiSPiRE Patrick Laidlaw says, is what drove the company to develop its recently released Colorscaping outdoor lighting system.
Released just before this year’s Lightapalooza, the new control system for outdoor color-tunable lighting has already garnered plenty of attention from dealers, and fits into a growing theme of using color tunable lighting to better accentuate outdoor fixtures, providing a whole new level of detail to some of the most captivating parts of outdoor spaces.
And this week, on the CE Pro Podcast, Laidlaw and his associate, Michael Sabolcik, IoT Product Manager at WAC, sat down with CE Pro to dig into the details on how the system works, and what value it can bring for integrators.
“We’ve been in the landscape lighting business for quite a while,” Laidlaw notes. “With human centric lighting coming on board, people paying attention to the indoors, and how tunable light makes a difference as well as the occasional need for color. We’ve been working over the the course of the last several years, developing this system we now know as Colorscaping.
“In the past with landscape lighting, when you wanted to deal with tunable white or color, it could become very complicated. There were value systems out there that were very inexpensive. They were unreliable. They had proximity issues for communication and also longevity challenges. Even our former color system was more complicated and simplify it. So now you can do tunable white fixtures on the outside of your home. We could make evergreens more greener Japanese maples, more red, flowering white dogwoods more white.”
“Rather than being limited to standard warm white or cool white temperatures. You could now take a Colonial contemporary, White House, and really make it pop instead of throwing yellow light on it and and making it dingy.”
Perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of the system from the technical side, Sabolcik mentioned, was the ease of onboarding it provided with its specialized transformers. While still equipped with the regular two wire system that regular landscape lighting uses, the system is able to use both for data and communication that allows for device discovery as soon as they are connected to the system.
“It’s as simple as going to the control panel inside the transformer pressing the zone, one button and then just holding down the presets button for six second,” Sabolcik notes. “The transformer then automatically starts that discovery process. It takes about 3 to 4 min. And it actually just confirms that all the fixtures that are connected to that transformer are able to be communicated with, and then it stores them locally. And then from that point forward you’re able to control those fixtures individually, add them to groups, create lighting scenes, and also add them to our schedules.”
Going deeper into, Sabolcik even said that dealers aren’t even limited to newer Colorscaping fixtures, with older fixtures working in the system, albeit at a limited capacity depending on the capabilities of the fixture itself. He also described how multiple transformers can be hooked up to one another to create what he describes as a “virtual circuit.”
“If you need to add additional transformers, you’re not being limited from a control perspective,” he explains. “Some other things we do to help with scaling is we support DMX. All of the Colorscaping transformers support DMX. So if you’re tying into a control system, you absolutely can do that. We also have a hardwired Ethernet connection as well. If you want that more robust connectivity.”
To hear the entire conversation with Laidlaw and Sabolcik, download or watch the CE Pro Podcast above. Find past episodes of the CE Pro Podcast by subscribing to the CE Pro YouTube channel or our Apple and Spotify podcast feeds.