There's also systems like Loxone where you have to wire everything but it avoids a star-like system as you can connect switches and lights in a tree-like fashion (ie, to connect another node, find the nearest node already connected and wire to it, that dramatically reduces the amount of cables).
I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
161–170 of 317 posts
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in The Netherlands and probably other parts of Europe, you are not allowed to run electricity and network or phone cables through the same tubes. Also the number of wires allowed in a single tube is limited. Many houses have concrete walls, floors and ceilings, so you don't run extra tubes easily... Reconfiguring switches is next to impossible and via existing switch wires you can dim/switch the lights but not c…
Conduit isn't very common in US residential construction. Electricians will generally cut a hole in the drywall, drill a hole in the floor plate and tack the cabling to the framing.
I think that is very location dependent. Here in the Midwest, Romex still isn’t a thing and most residential construction still requires (effectively or otherwise) 1/2” electrical conduits for all high voltage wiring. Older construction might be the horrible BX/AC instead.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#163Since lockdown started, we've gradually converted most of our house to Hue. A key feature is that _all the light switches still work_. We just don't use them all that much, unless something's failed. From reading Matthew Garrett's exploits, I'm pretty sure we don't want WiFi IoT devices. We have Hue switches next to the physical switches, which don't depend on WiFi being up; Smart control works with only local networ…
Would you mind sharing what panel this is?
It's a Hue ceiling panel that I'm not sure they make any more. https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07FXT4XH6
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
The easy solution is to have the intelligence in the lightbulbs the way Philips, Osram and IKEA did on their Zigbee based systems. I have all lights (100+) in the house on Zigbee but without changing any wiring. Only non standard is that I replaced all the wall switches with a variant that's electrically "always on" and sends a Zigbee command when pressed (and can be pulled out to access a traditional physical switch…
> I have all lights (100+) Your house is massive or your castle is very tiny. Either way, that’s an usual amount of lightbulbs.
I just counted my Hue lights in the apartment I live in and got up to 30, 90sqm.
I have some bulbs, 4 spot lights, lightstrips around the living room. Lamps around the studio, bedrooms, living room. If you add bias lighting and indirect light by bouncing off the ceiling you add up quite fast.
Granted, I built up this setup over some time, finding the best use for each set of lights I got but I can definitely see how you could get up to 100+ in a larger house.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#165Good grief... who would sign up for such a thing? The biggest lighting system I worked on was Philips Dynalite. It's a gigantic RS-485 bus - you just make sure all the dimmers and light switch panels are on the segment. It can be over a kilometre long and you can control/reprogram everything from everywhere on that bus. The protocol is simple enough that you can bit-bang subsets of it from dumb devices. Do recommend.
Is this much different to DMX?
DMX is a one-way single-master bus.
That means you can't have multiple light switches on the same network without quite a bit of complexity, you can't detect what's on the network, you can't update firmware or do device setup over the network, and so on.
In stage applications that's not a problem because all the light switches are in one place - the lighting desk - and the lighting guy there can see all the lights at the same time.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#166Wireless lighting control is an inelegant solution to a nonexistent problem.[0] How many years of his life has this guy wasted in order to save himself the trouble of spending 2 seconds using a wall switch a few times a day?
[0] https://www.theonion.com/horoscope-for-the-week-of-october-3...
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#167I wouldn't buy a house with such a system in it, and I doubt anybody else will, either. Who wants to become an expert on these systems just to turn the lights on? Not a chance. I considered these systems when my house was built, and am very glad I didn't get them. I turn the switch on, the lights go on, I turn it off, the lights go off. I replace a bulb now and then. That's it! I'm very happy with it. But what I did…
The easy solution is to have the intelligence in the lightbulbs the way Philips, Osram and IKEA did on their Zigbee based systems. I have all lights (100+) in the house on Zigbee but without changing any wiring. Only non standard is that I replaced all the wall switches with a variant that's electrically "always on" and sends a Zigbee command when pressed (and can be pulled out to access a traditional physical switch…
I tried the IKEA bulbs. They have coil whine turned off any made my unable to fall asleep. Apparently it's a known issue: https://i.reddit.com/r/tradfri/comments/arlyiz/coil_whine_an...
At the moment I have standalone lamps with Sonoff D1 dimmer and halogen (yes, really) bulbs that can actually be dimmed 0-100%.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#168I don't understand why there are no powerline network industry standards fir home automation other than the aging X10 and we have to rely on wireless comms. Maybe the PRIME or G3-PLC industry alliances will change this and come up with something useful. This is also needed for smart grids. It would eliminate the need to run parallel wiring for automation or use wireless tech. Separation could be done at the circuit breakers with lowpass filters and cable runs could use shielded cables with the shield connected to earth in order to eliminate crosstalk and prevent the power network become an antenna and pollute the radio spectrum with RF noise. Today's network tech for smart homes is immature and relies heavily on WiFi and industry standards designed for computer networking when in reality what is needed is something like a powerline bus for flipping switches, reading meters, remote controled power factor correction and so on.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those who don't have Hue, one nice feature of the design is that if the power to the bulb goes off and then back on the bulbs default to 'on'. This means that if you have a power cut, the lights come on automatically afterwards without the controllers being needed, which is useful at night so you don't have to wait for wifi. But it also means that you can turn them off and then on again at the normal light switch…
If I had a short power cut in the night and it resulted in all the lights coming on, I'd be pretty unhappy.... I'd rather just sleep through it.
I don't have them in my bedroom, so that hadn't occurred to me. It's configurable though apparently.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
the electrician didn't understand words like "crosstalk" Can you explain what the problem is? I also run cat5 (or maybe even cat6, don't remember) to every room, most even multiple times, just put it in walls/cailings/whatever worked and all 40 or so sockets work just fine. I turn the switch on, the lights go on, I turn it off, the lights go off. I run a star configuration for switches and light points, where all swi…
Crosstalk is when two wires are close together, one induces a voltage in the other (it's how transformers work). The trouble with house wiring is if you run a phone line parallel and close to an A/C line, it will induce a 60 cycle hum in the phone line, which will drive you utterly mad. The electrician was installing the cat3 phone wires in the same holes as the A/C wires. It was guaranteed to induce a hum. The corre…
> if you run a phone line parallel and close to an A/C line, it will induce a 60 cycle hum in the phone line
Isn't twisting the pairs supposed to prevent that? Isn't that what makes it feasible to run telephone lines on the same poles as electricity, thus allowing the POTS system to be practical?