Lighting Installation & Smart Controls in Austin, TX

Yes, with some trade-offs. Ultra-thin LED wafer fixtures (sometimes called pancake lights) are designed for retrofit installation in finished ceilings without attic access. They mount directly to the ceiling drywall, eliminating the need to cut in a can and run wiring from above. The wiring still needs to be run from a switch location to each fixture — in a single-story home with a finished attic or a multi-story installation, this typically requires fishing wire through walls and ceiling cavities, which adds labor. The fixtures themselves look identical to standard recessed cans and perform just as well. We assess access on a room-by-room basis before quoting.

Lutron Caseta is a smart lighting control system that replaces standard wall switches and dimmers with wireless-controlled units. Each Caseta switch communicates using Lutron's proprietary Clear Connect RF frequency, which operates independently of your home Wi-Fi — making it more reliable than Wi-Fi-dependent smart switches. A small Caseta Smart Bridge (hub) plugs into your router and connects the switches to your phone app and to voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple HomeKit's Siri. Pico remote controls can be mounted anywhere in the home without wiring to act as virtual 3-way switches. Caseta is widely regarded as the most reliable consumer-grade smart lighting system available, and it requires no subscription or cloud dependency after setup.

Recessed lighting installation cost depends on several factors: how many fixtures, whether attic access is available for easy wiring runs, whether a new circuit needs to be run from the panel, and the fixture type. A simple kitchen retrofit — 6 to 8 fixtures in a room with attic access and an existing lighting circuit with capacity — is generally a single-day project. Adding fixtures to a room that requires a new circuit run is more involved. We provide written estimates after a site assessment; we don't quote recessed lighting over the phone because the access situation varies too much between homes to be meaningful without seeing the space.

Yes. We install hardwired 120V outdoor lighting for patios, overhangs, driveways, and landscape beds. This includes soffit-mounted downlights under overhangs, wall sconces at entry doors, post lights, and ground-mounted accent fixtures. We also install the dedicated outdoor GFCI circuits that low-voltage 12V landscape lighting transformers need to be properly powered. All outdoor wiring uses conduit and fixtures rated for wet locations. A permit is required for new outdoor circuits in Austin; we pull it and schedule the inspection.

We install Lutron Caseta (our primary recommendation for reliability), Leviton Decora Smart (Wi-Fi and Z-Wave variants), and standard dimmer switches from Lutron and Leviton for customers who don't need app or voice control. We can also work with Kasa (TP-Link) switches in existing smart home setups. We don't install Insteon (discontinued), Wink (discontinued), or systems that require a proprietary hub with an active subscription to function. For whole-home smart lighting projects, we discuss the system options, their trade-offs, and integration with whatever smart home platform you're already using before recommending a direction.