No. Every Lightwave smart dimmer works with or without a neutral. Take the plate off, find three wires instead of four, and you're still fine.

This stops more people than anything else on this page. They read a forum thread, unscrew the switch, don't see a blue wire, and decide a smart home isn't for their house.

On a Lightwave dimmer the neutral terminal is an option, not a requirement. What it changes is which bulbs you can use.

It's worth knowing what the alternatives ask of you. Most systems that claim to solve this hide a module in the ceiling rose behind each light fitting: extra parts, more labour, and a blank plate on the wall covering it. Ours is a switch. It goes where your old switch went, and it looks like a switch when it's done.

Not necessarily for a straightforward swap in your own home. It wires the same way as any switch, into the same back box.

Lightwave dimmers are designed to fit in place of a standard light switch, so there is no specialist smart home wiring or commissioning required.

As with any work involving mains electricity, the power must be safely isolated before installation. If you are not confident or comfortable carrying out electrical work, we recommend using a qualified electrician.

Once installed, everything else is managed through the Lightwave app, so there is no need to call an installer back whenever you want to change scenes, automations or settings.

No. Lightwave is built for UK retrofit. It runs on the wiring already in your wall. No chasing, no lifting floors, no replastering, no redecorating.

This assumption kills more smart home projects than any other, and it comes from the wired systems, where it's genuinely true. Those are centralised: everything runs back to a rack, which means dedicated cable at first fix, which means you commit during a build or you don't do it at all.

Lightwave is distributed. The intelligence sits in each device, on the wiring that's already there. That's why it works in a 1930s semi as readily as a new build.

And it isn't only the lights. Sockets swap out the same way. Anything with no switch on the wall at all, an extractor fan, a ceiling fan, garden and facade lighting, LED strip, a pond pump, a blind motor, gets a relay behind the fitting and becomes smart anyway.

Yes. Two way, three way, intermediate, however many control points you want. There's no limit, and you can add more anywhere you like with no wiring at all.

The landing light is the scenario we get asked about most, and there's a stubborn belief that smart switches can't handle it.

They can. One rule: every control point on that circuit needs to be a Lightwave switch. You can't leave one as a conventional switch, because a conventional switch cuts the power the smart one needs. One is the master, the others follow. We'll set that up with you on the phone if you'd like. It's a five minute call.

Here's the part people don't expect. Because the switches talk over radio rather than through the wiring, you can put a control point where there's no cable at all, and you can have as many as you want. Our wire free switches are battery powered, stick to the wall, and can last over five years on a battery.

Want to control the landing light from the bottom of the stairs, where there's never been a switch? That's a five minute job and no plasterwork. People use them by the bed, outside a bedroom door, at the top of a loft ladder, or as a one press "everything off" by the front door.

Your devices don't run on your wifi. Press a switch and the light comes on, broadband or no broadband. Sockets and relays keep working too.

This is the question we're asked more than almost any other, usually as: "just to check, the switches would still work as normal switches if the wifi was down?"

Yes. Lightwave devices communicate with the hub over a dedicated radio network rather than each connecting individually to your Wi-Fi. That means adding more Lightwave devices does not mean adding dozens of extra devices to your Wi-Fi network, helping to avoid unnecessary Wi-Fi congestion and keeping your smart home separate from the devices you use for streaming, browsing and everyday internet use.

One hub covers the whole property. Lightwave devices communicate using specially designed radio antennas, capable of pushing signals up to 1000m outdoors and 100m indoors.

People hear "hub" and think extra cost and another thing to break. Here's what you actually get for it.

Your devices don't each need a wifi connection, an IP address and a slice of your bandwidth. They talk on a dedicated radio network built for the job, through antennas designed specifically for it. That combination is what gives the range: seamless control across even the most expansive spaces, which makes it suited to large properties and outdoor installations alike. Outbuildings, garages, garden lighting, gates and annexes all sit comfortably within reach of a single hub.

Why the numbers you read elsewhere are hard to compare

It's worth knowing that this industry quotes "range" in three completely different ways, and rather hopes you won't notice.

• Hub to device, in one hop. The distance from the hub to the thing you're controlling, directly, with nothing in between. That's how we quote ours.
• Node to node, per hop. A mesh figure. It describes the gap between two neighbouring devices, not the reach of the system. Total coverage then depends on owning enough mains powered devices and them happening to sit in the right places.
• Cable length. Occasionally a headline figure turns out to be how far you can run a cable to a remote aerial, which isn't radio range at all.

There's a second, less obvious consequence. On a mesh, a command may be handed along through several devices before it arrives, and every hop adds delay. Ours goes straight from the hub to the device, so there's none of the lag a mesh accumulates while relaying a signal across a property.

No. The app, the automations, the scenes, the timers and the energy monitoring are free. They stay free. Nothing you own stops working.

You do not need a subscription to use Lightwave. The app, automations, timers, scenes, schedules, energy monitoring and device settings are all included as standard, alongside a two year warranty and UK-based support.

There is an optional membership, Lightwave PLUS, at £8 a month. It adds an extended warranty for as long as you are a member, cloud backup of your setup, bookable support calls and reward points.

It is genuinely optional. If you cancel PLUS, your Lightwave system and all of its standard features continue to work as normal.

No. Lighting is where people often start, though not always, and it's a fraction of what the system does.

The same hub and the same app run smart dimmers and switches, smart sockets with energy monitoring built in, wire free battery switches you can put anywhere, relays, sensors and heating control, all together, with automations that cross between them rather than sitting in three apps that ignore each other.

The relays are the part people underestimate. If something runs on a circuit, a relay behind the fitting will almost certainly control it: blind and curtain motors, extractor and ceiling fans, garden and facade lighting, LED strip, pumps, gate and garage lighting, towel rails, water features. In practice it's very rare that we're shown something and have to say no.

That's usually the moment a project changes shape. People come to us about a lounge full of downlights and leave having worked out that the outside lights, the sockets behind the television and the heating in the extension can all sit on the same system, on one app, controlled from the same switch by the front door.

Yes, and with a wider range of LEDs than anything else on the market, because of how much control we give you over the dimming itself.

LED bulbs are wildly inconsistent. Two bulbs with identical packaging can behave completely differently on the same dimmer, which is why "why do my LED lights flicker" is one of the most searched questions in UK lighting, whatever brand of dimmer you buy.

Most manufacturers deal with that by publishing a short list of bulbs they've tested and leaving you to it. We took the opposite approach and built the adjustment into the hardware, so the dimmer adapts to your bulbs rather than the other way round.

Lightwave is designed to work with a very wide range of LED lighting, including setups that many smart dimmers struggle with.

Each product has a maximum load per channel, which varies depending on the product and the type of lighting being controlled. If you are planning a larger or more unusual lighting setup, tell us what you are looking to achieve and we can help you choose the right products, keep everything within the recommended limits and give you the best possible compatibility and long-term reliability.

No. Lightwave works with all the major voice and integration platforms, which means it works with an enormous amount of what you already own, or might buy next.

It's a fair worry. Plenty of people have been burned by a smart home brand that only talked to itself, and then stopped talking at all.

The practical effect of those integrations is that you stop having to think about brands at all. Something happens on one manufacturer's device, and your Lightwave devices respond. Two examples of the sort of thing customers actually set up, with roughly how long each takes:

The same idea extends further. An intruder alarm or external PIR can trigger your Lightwave lights, sockets and blinds to respond however you want them to. The device doing the detecting does not need to be made by Lightwave, which is rather the point. You should not have to limit what you buy next to whatever your first purchase happened to be.

The other half of the answer matters more, and almost nobody asks it: what happens if you stop using the app altogether? Every switch on your wall carries on working as a switch. The automations already saved on your hub carry on running. Unlike a system where the intelligence lives in a cloud account, the thing screwed to your wall is a functioning light switch first and a smart device second. You're never one server away from a dark hallway.

Smart bulbs are a genuinely good way to try this. Buy one, live with it for a month, and you'll know whether a smart home is for you. Most people who enjoy it end up at switches.

We're not going to talk you out of a smart bulb. They're inexpensive, they take thirty seconds, and for a rented flat or a single bedside lamp they're the sensible answer. Plenty of our customers started exactly there.

What tends to move people towards switches is living with bulbs for a while and noticing three things.

• The wall switch becomes a hazard. Turn it off and the bulb is dead to the app, so the household learns not to touch it. Guests, children and cleaners never get that memo.
• You replace the smart part every time a bulb goes. The intelligence is in the consumable, which is an odd place to put it.
• The maths turns on you in a room with several lamps. Six downlights means six smart bulbs. One dimmer does the same room whatever is in the ceiling, and keeps the fittings you already chose.

That's the whole argument, and it only really applies once you know you want this. If you're still deciding, buy a bulb.

No. The current hub runs first generation Connect Series devices alongside the new ones. You don't have to rip anything out to move forward.

If you bought into Lightwave years ago, this is the question that matters, and we know some of you have been putting off finding out.

The L2 Link Plus works with both Connect Series and Smart Series devices. You can add a new room without touching the old ones, and replace older kit at your own pace as and when you feel like it, not on a deadline we set.

Being straight about the limits: Connect Series was made between 2009 and 2018 and isn't manufactured any more, so if a first generation device fails it's replaced with a current one rather than repaired.

And if you'd rather move over properly in one go, talk to us before you order anything. We put together upgrade packages for long standing customers, because people who backed us early shouldn't be treated the same as someone starting from scratch. What that looks like depends entirely on what you've already got, which is why it's a conversation rather than a code.

Very much so. More than half our customers come to Lightwave during a new build or a major renovation, and it's one of the few decisions on a build you don't have to make early.

There's a persistent belief that a smart home has to be designed in at the start, alongside the drainage and the heating. With a centralised system that's true, and it's a genuine burden: a control specification at first fix, dedicated cable through the whole building, a rack location agreed months before anyone has chosen a light fitting.

Lightwave uses the standard UK wiring your electrician is already installing. No control cable, no bus, no distribution board to design around, and no room to give up to a server rack. Your electrician wires the property exactly as they normally would, first fix and second fix, and the smart layer goes on afterwards.

That means you don't need to make complicated smart home decisions just to make the system work. What can be worth thinking about earlier is what you actually want the home to do. Whole house scenes, automated lighting, blinds, heating, power, energy monitoring and integrations can all work together, and a lot of people don't realise how much is possible until we start talking it through.

Lightwave does not have to be an all or nothing purchase. You can start with a single room, a few switches, or one particular problem you want to solve, then add to the system whenever it makes sense.

At the other end of the scale, you can plan the whole property at once. That gives you the most freedom to create whole home scenes, routines and automations, and can also make installation more efficient by completing everything together rather than arranging separate visits later.

Neither approach is better or worse. Some customers want the complete smart home from day one, while others prefer to start smaller, see how they use the system, and expand room by room.

All of our product prices are available on the website, so you can build a good idea of cost yourself. If you are working on a larger project, we can also help you decide what is worth doing now, what can wait, and where you will get the most benefit.

Lightwave is much more than a collection of switches you can control from your phone. The system is designed so that lighting, power, heating, blinds and compatible third-party products can work together across the whole property.

That could be something as simple as one button turning everything off when you leave, or a much more involved home where different rooms, devices and routines respond automatically throughout the day.

The main difference is how Lightwave achieves it. Rather than building the home around dedicated control cabling, central equipment and specialist programming, Lightwave adds the automation layer to standard UK wiring. The intelligence is built into the products and the software, so the system can be incredibly capable without making the property itself complicated.

It also means the home can keep evolving. Add another room, change what a button does, create a new scene or completely rethink an automation later without having to redesign the underlying system.

A proper smart home should be judged by what the house can do, not by how much equipment is hidden in a cupboard.

You're not locked in either direction. Hand it over to the buyers or take the hub and go, and we'll do it with you on the phone.

We get this from both ends: sellers who want to leave something that works, and buyers who've inherited a house full of Lightwave and can't get into it.

• Selling? We transfer ownership to the new owner's account with their settings and automations intact. One call.
• Just moved in? If the previous owner has gone, we can still release the devices to you. You don't need anything from them.
• Taking it with you? Switches unscrew like any switch plate. Put the originals back, take yours, and your automations restore onto the hub at the new place.