How To Plan Take Offs for a New House

We design houses in three steps

  1. Light / switch loops - design wattage per room, number of switches needed, and lighting plan
  2. 3-way flow overlay - how people move through the house and plan 3-way and optional smart controls
  3. Home run plan - recommend budget for 96-watt per home run

Lighting and Switch Plan

  • Assign a unique name to each group of 4 or fewer lights - a “loop”.
  • Markup the PDF with loops with lights, fans, ceiling fans, and switches.
  • Enter into the spreadsheet - it creates total counts and costs.
  • Break up larger rooms into 4 strings of 4 lights on 1 switch, operating in Tandem mode with other switches to deliver 3-way controls all in sync.
  • Decide on Smart (AL-WS-DR2), Local (AL-WS-DR1), or simple (Value: On/Off $0.75 switch).
  • Decide on CCT tunable vs fixed lighting.
  • Decide on Motion detection.
  • Decide on ceiling fans and exhaust fans.

User Flow Plan and 3-Way Switching

Audit 3-way requirements and show the 3-way needs by marking how people flow through the house resulting in the location for each 3-way control.

Add AL-WS-M or AL-WS-8B as needed.

Home Run Plans per NEC Code

Finally, optimize the design to reduce the number of home runs, assign virtual 3-way, and multi-button keypads as needed.