In this guide

This article is part of our wider coverage of home automation in Hyderabad. Where our guide to keypad placement answers where keypads go, this one answers the harder question that follows: what goes on them.

Every button is a promise

A wall keypad is not a switchboard with nicer graphics. A switch controls a circuit; a keypad button triggers a scene — a saved state across many channels, each at its own level, reached over a chosen fade time. One press of Dinner might take the dining pendant to 55 percent at 2700K, the surrounding downlights to 20, the cove to 35, the artwork spots to 60 and the kitchen general to off, all over a two-second fade.

That is why the label matters more than the hardware. The button is a promise about what the room will look like, and a person makes that promise good by pressing it without thinking. Three consequences follow, and they drive everything else in this guide:

If any of that sounds like it belongs to the scene design rather than the keypad, that is the point — you cannot plan a keypad before you have written the scenes. Our worked scene examples with real dim levels are the correct starting document, and why scene-based automation beats app-only control explains why the wall button is still the primary interface in a well-designed home.

How many buttons per keypad

The honest answer for almost every position in an Indian home is four to six. Eight is a ceiling, justified only at an entrance. The constraint is human memory, not the module: past six choices people stop reaching for the wall and start opening the app, and a keypad nobody presses is an expensive blank plate.

Working figures we design to:

Notice what that adds up to: a home with 36 dimmable channels is operated day to day through roughly 30 buttons across eight or nine plates. That compression — many channels, few buttons — is the entire value of the control layer. If your keypad schedule starts to approach your channel count, the design has quietly reverted to being a switchboard. The channel side of that arithmetic is covered in how to plan dimmer channels and lighting loads.

Where extra functions should go instead

Every keypad we plan carries more capability than it shows, using press behaviours rather than more buttons. Keep to one hidden behaviour per button and apply it identically across the house:

Layout order and muscle memory

On a vertical column of buttons, order is not cosmetic. Two rules make a house learnable in a week:

Rule 1 — brightest at the top, darkest at the bottom. Scenes should descend in light level down the plate: Bright, Evening, Relax, Good Night. The hand learns that lower means darker, and it becomes correct in every room without anybody being taught.

Rule 2 — All Off is always the bottom button, on every keypad in the house, without exception. This is the single highest-value convention available, because it is the button people press in a hurry, in the dark, in a room they do not live in. Guests find it. Children find it. Housekeeping finds it. Make it the bottom position and never move it, even on a plate where it forces an otherwise awkward order.

After those two, group by kind: lighting scenes together in the upper block, then non-lighting actions — curtains, AC, a security arm-away action — in a lower block just above All Off. Do not interleave a curtain button between two lighting scenes; the pause it causes while somebody re-reads the plate is exactly what good layout eliminates.

Where a room has more than one entrance, both plates must carry the same buttons in the same order, even if one of them consequently holds a button that position hardly needs. Two doors into a living room with mirrored layouts is a bug that surfaces every day for a decade.

Engraving: wording, characters, icons

Engraving is a physical process. The wording is laser-cut into the faceplate before it ships, and the backlight shows through the cut. That has practical limits worth designing to rather than discovering:

Two wording traps are worth naming because we see both regularly. The first is labelling by circuit — Light 1, Light 2, Cove, Zone B. These describe the wiring, and they force everyone in the house to hold a mental map of the electrical drawing. The second is labelling by furniture or occupant — Ravi's Room, TV Wall. Rooms change occupants and televisions move; the label outlives both, and correcting it means a new plate.

A house-wide label vocabulary

Decide the words once, for the whole home, and use them everywhere. A fixed vocabulary is what allows somebody to walk into an unfamiliar room in your house and operate it correctly on the first press. A workable set for a Hyderabad home:

Eleven words cover an entire house. No plate uses more than six of them, but every plate draws from the same list, and no idea appears under two different names anywhere in the home. Write this vocabulary into the drawing set before any plate is ordered, and hand the same sheet to whoever configures the system so the app's names match the engraving exactly — a scene called Evening in the app and Relax on the wall is a support call waiting to happen. Whether your household needs the app at all is worth deciding early: see app, wall keypad, or both.

Gang sizes, back-boxes, heights and backlight

This is the section to give your electrician, ideally as a marked-up drawing before plastering.

Back-boxes and gang sizes

Heights

Backlight and feedback

Backlight is a comfort setting, not a brightness contest. Set the standby glow to a level that lets you find the plate in a dark corridor without lighting the room — typically 5 to 10 percent at night with a brighter daytime level, on a schedule. In bedrooms, take the standby level lower still or off after the Good Night scene runs, because a glowing plate opposite a bed is a complaint we hear far more often than any functional fault. Confirm at commissioning that each press gives a visible acknowledgement, so nobody presses twice and lands in the double-press variant by accident.

A worked 3BHK keypad & engraving schedule

A representative 1,600 sq ft three-bedroom flat. This is the format the schedule should take — position, height, button count and the exact engraved words, top to bottom.

Total: 10 plates, 44 buttons, drawn from an 11-word vocabulary, operating roughly 36 dimming channels, motorised curtains across five windows and the security system. Every plate has All Off at the bottom; every bedroom uses the same four words; no label anywhere refers to a circuit, a zone, a room number or a person.

Mistakes that cost a new faceplate

How Pert delivers it — a designed solution, not a DIY kit

Pert is a solutions company: we design and install. For keypads that means the engraving schedule is a drawing we produce, not a form we send you to fill in. We start from the scene list, derive the button count for each position, fix the vocabulary across the whole home, and issue a keypad schedule showing every plate with its position, mounting height, gang size, back-box requirement and the exact engraved wording top to bottom. That drawing goes to the electrician before plastering — so the boxes are set at the right heights, flush with the finished surface, with a neutral at each one — and to the interior contractor, so no plate ends up behind a wardrobe or a door swing.

Before engraving is released we tape a full-size mock-up of each plate in its final position and walk the home with you, because the wording that reads well on a screen sometimes reads oddly on the wall. We supply and install the Stella wall keypads alongside the tunable and dimmable COB, strip and spot lighting, motorised curtain tracks and motors and security hardware, then commission the scenes behind the buttons after dark with the real fixtures in place, and return to re-tune them once the household has lived with the home for a few weeks. If you are comparing providers, ask to see a keypad and engraving schedule from a completed project — it is one of the fastest ways to tell a designer from a reseller, and our guide to the best home automation companies in Hyderabad covers the rest of what to check before you sign.

Building or renovating in Hyderabad? Keypad heights, back-boxes and neutrals have to be settled before plastering, and the engraved wording three to four weeks before handover — both come from your scene list, not from a switchboard drawing. Request a consultation →

Frequently asked questions

How many buttons should a smart home keypad have?

Four to six for almost every position in a home, with eight as an absolute ceiling and only at the entrance. The limit is not the hardware, it is recall: a person walking into a dark room does not read a wall panel, they press the button their hand already knows, and that only works while the layout is small and stable enough to memorise. Past six buttons people stop reaching for the keypad at all and start using the app instead, which defeats the purpose of putting a keypad there. The right way to arrive at the number is to write the scenes first and count them — a bedside position genuinely needs four (Reading, Relax, Good Night, All Off), a living room six, an entrance six with one left blank for whatever the house asks for in its second year. If a room appears to need ten buttons, the scenes are wrong, not the keypad: two similar scenes should be merged, or a rarely used function moved to the app where it costs nothing to hide.

What should keypad engraving say — scene names or room names?

Scene names, in the household's own words, describing the moment rather than the machinery. Morning, Reading, Dinner, Movie, Relax, Good Night and All Off tell a guest what will happen when they press; Light 1, Circuit 3, Cove or Zone B describe the wiring and mean nothing to anybody who did not install it. Keep each label to one word where possible and no more than about ten to twelve characters per line, because the engraved area on a button is small and a long label has to be set in a type size that is unreadable in low light — which is exactly when keypads are used. Use the same word for the same idea in every room in the house: if the bedroom button says Good Night, the entrance button must not say Goodnight or Sleep. And avoid labels that go stale, such as a person's name or a brand of television, because changing an engraved label means manufacturing a new faceplate.

At what height should a wall keypad be installed?

Entrance and room keypads sit with the centre of the plate at about 1,150 to 1,250mm above finished floor level, matching the switchboard line used through the rest of the home so the wall reads as deliberate rather than assorted. Keep the plate 100 to 150mm clear of a door architrave, on the handle side of the door, and never behind the swing of an opened door. Bedside keypads are the exception and should sit much lower, at roughly 600 to 750mm above finished floor, which puts them within reach of a hand resting on the mattress rather than requiring somebody to sit up in the dark. Kitchen keypads go above the counter backsplash at about 1,250mm and clear of the wet zone around the sink. In every case the back-box must finish flush with the final wall surface, so the tile, cladding or panelling thickness has to be known before the box is set — a box fixed to bare brickwork ends up 8 to 10mm recessed once the tiling is done.

Can keypad button labels be changed later?

What the button does can be changed in software at any time; what the button says cannot. Engraving is a manufacturing step performed on the faceplate before it ships, so a change of wording means ordering a replacement plate and waiting for its lead time, typically two to three weeks. That is why we lock engraving schedules about three to four weeks before handover and why we deliberately leave one blank button on the entrance and living keypads: houses discover a scene they did not know they wanted in their first year, and a blank button lets that scene be added with a single plate swap rather than a redesign. The underlying scene behind an existing label — which channels it touches, at what levels, over what fade time — is tuned at commissioning and re-tuned free of charge later, so it is worth choosing labels that describe the moment rather than the settings, since only the settings are cheap to change.