How to Set Up Remote Home Theater Lighting

Remote home theater lighting can be a superb addition to a viewing room. If you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up a room with an HD television, good seating and a surround sound system, you will need good lighting to set it all off properly. It’s not difficult to set up remote home theater lighting as long as you have the right equipment.

Step 1 - How the System Works

You can set up a series of dimmer lights that are controlled through an X10 controller. The X10 protocol is the important part since it gives the remote control the ability to take charge of everything while you remain in your seat. Since it’s a protocol, the brand of product doesn’t matter as long as everything is on the same protocol. According to estimates, there are around 256 different devices that can be controlled by an X10 controller.

Adding in an X10 macro allows you to add a lot of subtlety and show to the lighting, including such things as highlighting a movie poster or something else prior to a movie starting on your system.

Step 2 - Dimmer Modules

In order to achieve proper remote home theater lighting, the lights in your home theater need to be equipped with X10 dimmer modules. If you already have dimmer switches on the lights then these will simply replace them. If you don’t, you can fit them as simple replacements as long as you’re not using fluorescent bulbs.

Simply turn of the circuit breaker for the lighting circuit in your home theater room, unscrew the cover plates and then unscrew the terminal for the light switch. Unscrew the wires from the terminals then attach them to the color coded terminals on the 10 dimmer switch before replacing the new switch in the wall. You’ll need a new cover plate for the dimmer switch, too.

Step 3 - Programming the Remote

The X10 controller, which is essentially a remote control, can be programmed according to the manufacturer’s instructions. When that’s been done, you will have complete remote home theater lighting control via a normal handheld remote control. Note, however, that you will need a special remote control that works with an X10 controller.

Light control with the remote will have to be part of the system set-up in the controller so the light will need to be equipped with an X10 controller too.

Step 4 - Macro

If you buy an X10 Macro controller, you can expand greatly with what you can do with your lighting and you can handle it all with the single remote control. Some systems can handle up to 42 different macros, each of them with 48 different programming steps; that’s a very wide range of possibilities in the realm of remote home theater lighting.

However, this is far more than what most people want or have time to master. Unless you have a taste for the dramatic and the desire to spend a lot of time programming your lights, you can have the kind of remote home theater lighting that will satisfy your needs with just a short investment of time for less than $100.