How to set the wallpaper, screensaver and clean your Control4 touchscreen

Your Control4 touchscreen is the heart of how you talk to your home — lights, climate, music, cameras, the lot. But it’s also a thing on your wall that you look at dozens of times a day, so it might as well look the part. Nine times out of ten when a customer rings us about their T4 or T3, it’s not a fault at all — they just want to know how to swap the wallpaper, set up a photo screensaver, or stop the screen lighting up the hallway at 2am.

This one’s a quick, basic guide to making your touchscreen look and behave the way you want, plus the right way to give it a clean without wrecking it. Everything here applies to the T4 and T3 touchscreens running OS 3.4 or later.

Changing the wallpaper

The wallpaper is the background you see behind your Home screen and your room buttons. Control4 ships a tidy set of stock backgrounds, and on OS 3 you’ve also got the option to use one of your own photos.

1. From the Home screen, swipe down from the top of the touchscreen to open the menu, then tap Settings (the gear icon).
2. Tap Wallpaper (on some setups it sits under Display).
3. You’ll see a row of built-in wallpapers — tap one to preview it live behind the menu.
4. To use your own image, choose Custom or Photos, then pick from any photo album we’ve set up on your system.
5. Tap Done or simply swipe the settings menu away. The change is instant.

If you want a custom photo album loaded onto the screen and it isn’t showing up, that’s something we set in Composer at our end. A quick message and we can push your chosen images across remotely.

Setting up the photo screensaver

When the touchscreen sits idle, it can run a screensaver instead of just dimming to black. A rolling photo slideshow is the favourite — family shots, the kids, the dog, a holiday in the snow. It turns a wall panel into something that actually adds a bit of warmth to the room.

1. Swipe down and open Settings.
2. Tap Screensaver.
3. Choose the type — typically Photos for a slideshow, Clock for a simple time display, or None to just let the screen dim and sleep.
4. If you choose Photos, select the album you’d like to display.
5. Set the delay — how long the screen waits while idle before the screensaver kicks in. Anywhere from one to several minutes works well.

The photos pull from the same albums as the wallpaper, so once we’ve loaded an album you can use it for both. If you’d like new photos rotated in seasonally, that’s an easy job for us during a routine visit.

Do-not-disturb and night settings

This is the setting our customers thank us for the most. A touchscreen near a bedroom, kitchen or open-plan living area can be surprisingly bright after dark, and the last thing you want is a glowing panel and chimes when the house has gone quiet.

There are a couple of ways to tame it:

• Display brightness and auto-dim — Under Settings > Display you can set the screen brightness and how aggressively it dims when idle. Turning this down for a panel in a hallway makes a big difference at night.
• Do Not Disturb — This stops intercom calls and notifications from ringing through on the touchscreen. Swipe down and look for the Do Not Disturb toggle in the quick menu, or under Settings depending on your setup.
• Scheduled night mode — The real magic. We can programme the touchscreen so the brightness automatically drops right down (or the screen goes fully dark) between, say, 10pm and 6am, and brightens again in the morning. This is set up in Composer as part of your automation, so if you’d like it dialled in, just ask.

If you’d like us to set automatic night dimming or quiet hours across all your touchscreens at once, that’s a tweak we can usually do remotely. Have a read of our automation guides for the kinds of time-based scenes we can build.

Proximity wake on the T4

The T4 touchscreens have a proximity sensor — they can detect when you walk up and wake the screen before you even touch it. It feels a little bit magic when it’s set up well, and it saves that half-second of tapping a dark panel.

1. Open Settings > Display on the T4.
2. Look for Proximity or Wake on Approach.
3. Toggle it on, and where available, set the sensitivity or wake distance.

One thing worth knowing: in a busy walkway, an over-sensitive proximity wake means the screen lights up every time someone wanders past. If that’s annoying you, dial the sensitivity down — or pair it with the scheduled night mode above so it stays dark overnight regardless. The T3 doesn’t have proximity sensing, so on those panels a tap or your scheduled wake-ups do the job instead.

Cleaning your touchscreen safely

Fingerprints and the odd bit of kitchen splatter are a fact of life with a wall panel. The good news is cleaning a Control4 touchscreen is easy — as long as you don’t reach for the wrong thing.

Here’s how we clean them, and what we tell our customers to do:

1. Put the screen into cleaning mode first if you can — some setups offer a clean-screen lock so you don’t trigger buttons while wiping. Otherwise, just be aware the screen is live.
2. Use a dry or very slightly damp microfibre cloth — the same kind you’d use on a phone or glasses.
3. Wipe gently in small circles to lift fingerprints and smudges.
4. For stubborn marks, dampen the cloth with a tiny amount of plain water — never soak it — and wipe, then go over it with the dry part of the cloth.
5. Don’t press hard, and don’t use paper towel, tissues or abrasive cloths, which can leave fine scratches.

That’s genuinely all it needs. A quick wipe once a week keeps it looking sharp. For more on getting the most out of your panels day to day, our touchscreen help section covers navigation, intercom and custom buttons too.

When to give us a call

Everything above is yours to change whenever you like — no electrician or dealer needed. Where we come in is the deeper stuff: loading custom photo albums, building scheduled night modes, adding rooms or buttons to the Home screen, or anything involving the wiring and mains side of an in-wall touchscreen. In Australia, installing or rewiring a hard-wired touchscreen is licensed-electrician work under AS/NZS 3000, so that part stays with our team — you can read more about why on the Control4 website and the Standards Australia resources.

So have a play — swap the wallpaper, load up some family photos, sort out the night dimming, and give the screen a wipe. If you’d like a hand setting up a custom photo album or automatic quiet hours across the house, get in touch with us via the contact page and we’ll sort it, often without even needing to drop by.

Cheers, and enjoy making it yours.
— Adam and the team at DUKE Electrical Group