Manufacturer’s agent — Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec
Lutron Lighting Controls and Motorized Shades
We design the control system alongside the photometric calculations that drive it. We coordinate the drivers, protocols and motorized shades that make daylight harvesting work, then commission the system on site and stay with it after handover.
Talk to us about a projectWhy Lutron
Lutron is the platform we specify when the controls strategy matters as much as the lighting. Across Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec, it is on nearly every large project we support. It is usually the difference between a building that runs the way it was designed and one that gets its controls overridden in the first month.
Wired or wireless — we specify the right one. For fully integrated whole-building control, Lutron Athena is our wired benchmark. But wired isn’t the only path, and often not the most cost-effective.
Lutron Vive delivers occupancy, daylight and dimming control without control wiring — which changes the maths on new builds and retrofits alike. On new construction, dropping the control wiring means installs up to 70% faster and lower bids, and the system scales room by room, and onto new floors later, without pulling more wire. On a retrofit, where that wiring doesn’t exist, Vive adds automatic control to an occupied building with minimal disruption to the people working in it. Some engineers still specify wired — a legitimate choice, and Athena is there for it. Our job is to put the right control layer on the project, wired or wireless.
Flux Lighting is the manufacturer’s agent for Lutron in Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec. When a project requires lighting controls, we specify Lutron.
Call us while the controls scope is still open — before the drivers are bought and the shade pockets are framed. Those are the decisions that are hardest to undo later.
Best fit for
- Corporate offices
- Government workplaces
- Healthcare facilities
- Higher-education and institutional
- Occupied-building retrofits
- LEED and energy-code fit-ups
- Complex daylight-harvesting designs
What we do with Lutron
Concept and zoning
We turn the plans into logical zones and scenes — drawn from the photometry, not guessed at.
Drivers and protocols
0–10 V, DALI and EcoSystem paired correctly, with Hi-lume where the dimming has to hold at 1% without dropping out.
Shades and daylight
Sivoia QS and Palladiom integrated for glare control and daylight harvesting.
Emergency and code
LVS Lutron-compatible relays so emergency fixtures go to full output on power loss, whatever the system was doing — UL924 life-safety compliance.
Commission and support
Programmed and commissioned on site — then re-programmed as the building changes.
The design
The control zones come out of the photometry, not the other way around. You cannot sensibly dim for daylight until you know what the daylight is doing in each room.
At Kinaxis the photometry was calculated for 202 separate zones before a single scene was programmed — so the control zones followed the light, not the floor plan. A 160,000-square-foot building lit by repeating one luminaire across five floors is not a design.
Drivers, protocols and the emergency path
A control system is only as good as what it is wired to. Lutron speaks 0–10 V, DALI and EcoSystem, and the three do not behave the same at the bottom of the dimming curve. We match the driver to the fixture and the protocol to the building — Hi-lume where the dimming has to hold at 1% without dropping out.
And we close the gap Lutron does not: LVS Lutron-compatible relays so that on loss of power the emergency fixtures go to full output regardless of what the control system was doing a second earlier. That is a life-safety code requirement, and it is the first thing an electrical engineer will ask about.
The shades are not optional
Daylight harvesting is the largest single energy saving available in a commercial lighting design — and it does not work without automated shading.
Dimming to daylight only works if the daylight is controlled first. Where it isn’t, the occupant solves the glare themselves — the blind comes down by hand, and it never goes back up.
At the Federation of Law Societies of Canada — a LEED Platinum floor at Constitution Square — the shading is sequenced to the sun’s path, so the daylight sensors read a condition we control rather than one that changes hour to hour.
And the wired-or-wireless choice extends to the shades. Lutron’s battery-powered shades run with no wiring at all — three to five years on a set of batteries — so daylight-responsive shading goes into a retrofit or a full-height glass wall without fishing power to every pocket. The motors are markedly quieter than competing systems — Lutron rates its battery roller shades at 38 dBA, about the level of a quiet library, measured three feet from a moving shade — which matters in a boardroom where a shade adjusting mid-meeting should not be heard.
Designed for the energy code — Ontario and Quebec
Ontario’s energy code (OBC Supplementary Standard SB-10) and Quebec’s, which follows the National Energy Code for Buildings (NECB), require automatic lighting controls in most commercial spaces — automatic shut-off, occupancy and vacancy sensing, daylight-responsive dimming, and scheduling. Lutron’s commercial platforms are built to deliver those strategies, and Lutron publishes SB-10 and NECB application guides that map the control approaches straight to the code. We design the control layer alongside the lighting and photometry, so compliance is built in from the start rather than bolted on later — and stays adaptable as the tenant, the floor plan, or the code changes.
Why commissioning matters
Controls that nobody understands get bypassed. A system nobody can operate is overridden in week one, and after that it is just an expensive dimmer. Scenes that do not match how the room is actually used get switched to full output and left there. Daylight sensors read a blind that somebody pulled down in March. The energy model says one thing; the building does another.
None of that is a Lutron problem. It is a specification and commissioning problem — which is the part we do. At the Federation of Canadian Municipalities — a Lutron Athena job — that meant matching every scene to how each space is actually used, not to the energy model.
See it before you specify it
Some controls decisions are easier to make with your hands than with a specification sheet. Our Ottawa showroom runs both Lutron platforms live — Athena on the commercial side and a full HomeWorks QS installation, Lutron’s flagship residential system, on the other. Work the Palladiom and Alisse keypads, run the Sivoia QS shades and drapery track, and see Ketra D2 downlights and Lumaris tape light before a single device is specified. For homes, our residential Lutron page covers HomeWorks in full.
What we specify
| System | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| Athena | Lutron’s current platform for whole-building control — cloud-connected lighting, shading and software. Our wired benchmark. |
| Energi Savr Node | Zone-level 0–10 V, DALI and EcoSystem control |
| Vive | Wireless control for new builds and retrofits — no control wiring, up to 70% faster installs, scales without a rewire |
| Sivoia QS | Motorized shading and daylight management |
| Palladiom | Shading where the bracket and hembar are part of the architecture |
| Ketra | Tunable white — colour and intensity across the working day |
| Alisse | Wall controls where the interior designer will be looking at them |
| Hi-lume drivers | Dimming that holds at the bottom of the curve without dropping out |
| LVS relays | Lutron-compatible emergency bypass — UL924 life-safety compliance |
We specify what the building needs, not what is quickest to quote. Talk to us when you are choosing between platforms, or writing the controls spec.
Where we’ve used it
Kinaxis Headquarters
Kanata — WELL-certified headquarters with 202 independently calculated control zones across five floors.
Federation of Law Societies of Canada
Ottawa — daylight harvesting integrated with Lutron Sivoia QS shades on a LEED Platinum floor.
Brookfield Renewable
Gatineau — Lutron controls through the office floor and reception.
Federation of Canadian Municipalities
Ottawa — a Flux-designed Lutron Athena system across two floors at 66 Slater.
Forest and Nature School
Ottawa — daylight and occupancy sensors on a Lutron system tune the light for the childcare day, stepping down for nap time and back up for pick-up.
Carleton University — Teraanga Commons
Ottawa — daylight and occupancy sensors on a Lutron system hold a warm, steady level across the dining hall through the lunch rush and the quiet afternoon.
Canadian Commercial Corporation
Ottawa — a full Athena floor where partition sensors re-zone the lighting and eighteen Sivoia QS shades when the boardroom wall closes; daylight harvesting added mid-build on wireless sensors.
Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
Ottawa — a national law firm’s two floors on one Lutron Quantum system that runs the lighting and twenty-two motorized shades together.
Start the conversation early
The controls decision is cheapest to get right at the beginning and most expensive to fix at the end. With information on the project type and floor area, whether it is new build or retrofit (and what wiring already exists), the certification target if there is one, and the budget the controls have to live inside. We will tell you what the building actually needs — and we will tell you if that is less than you were expecting.
The earlier we are involved, the more options you have
Planning an office, government, healthcare, institutional, or retrofit project? Bring us into the conversation before the controls scope is fixed.
Get in touchRelated: Lutron on our line card · Our services · Office lighting projects