What’s the big deal about Ketra Lighting?
February 12, 2023
Every once in a while, an advancement in technology comes along and completely changes an industry. It doesn’t happen often but when it does, there is no turning back. There is a ton of buzz around Lutron Electronics’ brand ‘Ketra Lighting’ as being one of those products, and the plaudits and recognition for this revolutionary product keep coming in.
Having installed the Ketra product throughout our Vancouver showroom more than a year ago, it was time to write about what we’ve found!
Firstly, what is Ketra Lighting and how is it different than all of the other LED lighting products out there? It all starts with the chip..
Traditionally, LED lighting chips have consisted of one diode emitting a specific colour temperature of ‘white’ lighting. For example, if you go to your local hardware store in search of an LED bulb, you will typically have the choice between 2700 Kelvin, 3000 Kelvin, 3500 Kelvin and, depending on the selection, perhaps a couple of others. The Kelvin (‘K’) measurement indicates how warm or cool of a white light the bulb emits. The higher the Kelvin, the cooler the white colour will be. An important limitation of these types of bulbs is that as you dim them down, the colour temperature stays the same along the dimming curve of bright to dim. Often when you dim LED lights down, they render more ‘grey’ light, which can interfere with and dilute the overall aesthetic of the space.
Coloured LED lighting is not new either. These lighting chips consist of three diodes, red, green, blue, which combine to make a limited palette of colours with a limited quality or CRI (colour rendering index). Then came RGBW chips, introducing a white diode to further expand this palette of available colours.
A very significant (and patented) differentiator of Ketra Lighting is that the engineers have mastered how to include 16 light emitting diodes on a single chip! These diodes work together to create a palette of colours of over 16 million options which is something that has not existed before from an LED light. People in the neighborhood of our Vancouver showroom often comment that they see colours in our showroom that they’ve never seen before. And – they are correct in saying that! No lighting system has been able to reach these areas of the colour spectrum before – making the Ketra system extremely unique.
What does this mean for your world? Well… options!
Using Lutron’s Homeworks (residential) or Athena (commercial) platforms to control the lighting, the options for lighting in your space are virtually limitless. From a programming standpoint, the Ketra lamps have an ability to generate white light from 1400 Kelvin (candlelight) all the way up to 10,000 Kelvin (moonlight) and everything in between. Further to that, there is an ability to introduce a massive variety of coloured lighting – from pastels to vibrant colours which are useful for entertaining scenes or accentuating different architectural elements of your home our commercial location.
Another massively important and useful feature is ‘vibrancy’. This feature allows you (by way of a slider in the Lutron app) to ‘remix’ the composition of one, or many of the lights. This changes the composition of the light by adjusting the amount of red light that is mixed in to create 3000 Kelvin for example. Why would you ever want that? Well, in our showroom’s case, we have some beautiful 1920’s red brick on some of our walls. At 0% vibrancy, the brick looks somewhat drab and washed out. When we increase the vibrancy to 75 or even 100%, the brick absolutely pops – taking advantage of this important architectural element of our space. Remember – the lights themselves still look the same as the others in the space – you can’t tell which ones have the vibrancy brought up and which ones do not, which keeps things looking consistent and proper. You can just secretly enhance areas that you wish. We have also used this feature to make our art look exactly how we want, enhancing the colours as we like. In short – this feature is an art-lover’s dream, as well as being extremely useful in making the textures and finishes of a home look exactly how you intended them to be.
Another favorite feature amongst our team is making use of the ‘Natural Show’ feature that is built into the Lutron Homeworks and Athena software suites, and can be deployed by one of our Lutron programmers. What is Natural show? In short, it’s ‘the right light at the right time’. Essentially what our bodies and minds crave in terms of ‘type of light’ changes throughout the day. In the morning, we appreciate warm light at lower to medium intensity (think of the sun rising over the horizon).
As the day wears on, we feel energized by cooler, brighter light (think of the sun, when it is highest in the sky).
And finally, as the day begins to wind down, slowly stepping back down to warmer colour temperatures and lower intensity light prepares us to have a relaxing evening and an even better sleep (think sunset and then candlelight). When mixing this feature in with a control system (creating a button on keypads that says ‘Natural’) allows our programmers to provide you with exactly the right light at every time of day or night – dynamically! Not only do we love this feature, but so do our clients.
Of course, you can only experience so much through text and photos. Our showroom features over 80 Ketra lights installed throughout the space and shows off the entire range of Ketra models – including small aperture pot lights, linears and light bars, track lights as well as bulbs installed in decorative fixtures. The experience for a light-lover is quite stunning and you should definitely see it in person! Get in touch with us to set up an appointment and experience Ketra for yourself today!
Learn more about Ketra and the entire Lutron family of products here.
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