Timer switches can be great energy savers if you often forget to turn lights off when you leave a room. They can also increase safety, allowing lighting to come on and off automatically to give the appearance that someone is home while you are away. Here we will discuss timers generally used for indoor applications. For more on outdoor varieties, see Energy-Efficient Outdoor Lighting.
Plug-in varieties simply plug into your wall, allowing you to operate one lamp or appliance. To select times you wish lights or appliances to turn on and off, you position tabs around a dial.
Screw-in timers fasten directly into a lamp’s light socket, allowing you to insert a bulb into the timer itself.
Other types—including spring-wound, electronic auto-off, and programmable timers—replace standard wall light switches.
Spring-wound timers have a mechanical dial that you wind to turn on a fixture. Depending on where you twist the dial, you can set the light to stay on anywhere from one to 60 minutes. Electronic auto-off timers have a standard “on”/“off” button and four other buttons, each corresponding to a specific time delay (for instance, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and 60 minutes). These are handy because they operate with the mere touch of a button. Another variety, the Insteon SwitchLinc, allows you to tap a single light switch paddle, adding on minutes to the time delay with each additional tap.
Programmable timers are digital devices that have up to six daily “on” and “off” settings, as well as a “random” setting that mixes up the times your lighting turns on and off while you are away, making it seem more probably to outside eyes that someone is home and, hopefully, foiling potential burglars.
Be sure to purchase the right timer for your fixture. Most will work with standard single-pole varieties (often referred to as SPST, or “single-pole, single-throw”), but three-way fixtures will require three-way timers.
For more information on replacing a standard switch with a timer, see Installing a Timer Light Switch.
