Your RadioRA 2 System Still Works. Your Lighting Has Moved On.

RadioRA 2 was Lutron's wireless workhorse for more than a decade, and a lot of homes in Pasadena, San Marino, and Arcadia still run on it. Here's the good news first: it was built to last, and most of it still works exactly as it did on day one. Dimmers and keypads like these don't really wear out. What has changed is everything around them: the lights themselves, the phones in our pockets, and the way a home is expected to respond. RadioRA 3 was built for that world. Here's where the gap shows up.

The lights changed

Most RadioRA 2 systems were designed when the ceiling was full of halogen and incandescent bulbs. Today almost everything is LED, and LED fixtures do far more than turn on and dim. Lighting designers now specify fixtures matched to the controls from the start, and a newer system gives you more ways to tune how each one dims, so the lights fade smoothly all the way down instead of being an afterthought.

Tunable and color light

The biggest shift in lighting is that light is no longer one color. Tunable white fixtures can shift from a crisp, energizing white in the morning to a warm, candle-like glow at night, and color fixtures add accent light for a party or a holiday. That kind of lighting is where many of our clients are heading, and it's what our tunable lighting work is built around. It needs a control system designed to manage it, and that's the RadioRA 3 generation, not RadioRA 2.

Linear and accent lighting

Under-cabinet light, cove light, and lighting tucked into stairs and shelving have become standard in a well-designed room. Adding them is easier when the system was designed with today's LED drivers and fixtures in mind.

Your phone and your voice

Plenty of RadioRA 2 owners used to control the house from an app that no longer works the way it did. Lutron's older Home Control+ app has been in maintenance since 2018 (source: Lutron's Home Control+ support article). RadioRA 3 runs on the current Lutron app, with scenes, schedules, and control from anywhere, and it's built to work with the voice assistants and smart home platforms people use every day, plus full control systems like Savant when the home has one.

Room to grow

A home keeps changing: a new keypad by the back door, a Pico remote on a nightstand, shades in a room that never had them. Older systems can run short on room for additions. A current system is built to keep growing with the house.

The upgrade is gentler than you'd think

Moving from RadioRA 2 to RadioRA 3 is one of the easiest upgrades in the Lutron world. Lutron lists RadioRA 2's Maestro dimmers and seeTouch keypads as compatible with the RadioRA 3 processor, so many of the devices already in your walls can stay (source: Lutron's RadioRA 3 processor specification, 3691221). Lutron's design software can also convert a RadioRA 2 project to RadioRA 3, so your existing scenes and buttons carry forward.

If nobody has your programming file

If the company that installed your system has retired or stopped answering, the project file may have gone with them. That's a takeover, and it's routine for us. We assess what's there, recover or rebuild the programming, and support it from then on, whether or not we installed it. And once you're on RadioRA 3, your programming is stored in the cloud, so it can't be lost if something happens to your system or your integrator down the road.

Not sure which Lutron system you have? Start with our field guide. Then a walkthrough, plus a photo of your main repeater and a keypad, tells us most of what we need to plan your next step.