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I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

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Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#201

Post by rootusrootus »

jackweirdy wrote: post #92
vr46 wrote: post #27

What is the point of trying to wirelessly link up a system that needs so much wiring in the first place, including electricity? This seems moronic, unless it’s for fun. And even then it’s pretty stupid.

Retrofitting new wires to every light fixture and switch in a house is unenviable. In some cases, impossible. Laminate floors can deprive you of subfloor access of a whole floor, running cables through existing stud walls is difficult at the best of times... Wirelessly linked smoke alarms are becoming extremely common now in the UK because outside a narrow envelope building regulations want linked alarms (linked eith…

> Wirelessly linked smoke alarms are becoming extremely common now in the UK

Also becoming a baseline feature in detectors in the US, in my experience. New houses have been using wired interconnect for a long time now, but in the last couple years I've helped several older relatives upgrade their smoke detectors and even the cheap ones have wireless interconnect now.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#202

Post by paleogizmo »

WalterBright wrote: post #56

I 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…

Smart lighting only makes sense in niche cases. I use the same Z-wave switches in my 60s-era house for a basement guest bedroom where the light switch is bizarrely in a storage closet outside the bedroom. I have another Z-wave switch to turn on an existing front porch light at dusk. This spared me needing to install a separate photocell.

The main value for smart home is in monitoring. I mostly use it for flood and door sensors without having to pay for a Ring/ADT subscription.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#203

Post by lillecarl »

mindslight wrote: post #182
lillecarl wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there's something inherent about forwarding packets or beaming WiFi that make devices unreliable or have you considered the possibility that purchasing a more expensive device might resolve these issues for you? MikroTik routers a good for the price, WiFi is decent. Ubiquity APs are good for their price, WiFi is about as good as it gets. HP ProCurve switches has been to space. You could use any device th…

IMO x86(_64) machines running a standard Linux distro with ath9k/ath10k cards is the way to go. Embedded access points are crappy, and loading OpenWRT on them just makes them crappy in different ways. I'm sure enterprise gear is better than the consumer stuff on average, but it's still painting myself into a corner. In a similar vein, it pains me to hear people complain about SD issues with Raspberry Pis. My Kodi ter…

The filesystem (ext4) should handle power failures just fine, so a more expensive SD card might do you well. There's a reason some are 5x the price of the cheap ones.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#204

Post by quickthrowman »

shawnz wrote: post #194
quickthrowman wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I did all that work myself because the electrician didn't understand words like "crosstalk" and I didn't want to find out after I moved in that the wires in finished walls didn't work. You hired a bad electrician. Any good electrician knows you can’t run power and data in the same conduit or pathway. NEC requires a divider in any junction box that contains low-voltage and line-voltage power, and also requires separ…

> Any good electrician knows you can’t run power and data in the same conduit or pathway. NEC requires a divider in any junction box that contains low-voltage and line-voltage power, and also requires separate conduits/pathways for low-voltage and line-voltage power (can’t use the same stud hole to feed both through) Sure, but aren't those rules for safety purposes and have nothing to do with crosstalk/interference?

Yes. My point is that an electrician who ignores (or isn’t aware of) NEC rules isn’t anyone I’d let near my home’s electrical wiring. Almost all NEC rules are for safety.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#205

Post by dwighttk »

WalterBright wrote: post #72
dwighttk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author mentioned that his house is made of stone, so running wires to the lights is less easy than in a hollow walled house.

It's not hard, you just run the wires in conduit. Yeah, you can see the conduit, but make it part of the decor. You'll see this in a lot of retrofits.

But it is not as easy.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#206

Post by vonnieda »

adanto6840 wrote: post #190
vonnieda wrote: post #180

I use Insteon dimmers and switches in my house. These replace the wall switch but look basically like a normal wall switch. They use a combination of power line networking and RF mesh networking for automation. This is the second house I've had entirely outfitted with them and I love it. IMHO it's critical to maintain control at the wall switch - if I am walking into the kitchen and want to turn the lights on, I just…

I did this on a prior home and then removed almost all of them just prior to moving. I haven't re-installed them in the 4-years we've been at our new home simply because the "failure rate" was so frustrating to me. I don't mean hardware failure, I mean "intermittent, rare command failure" -- I've never experienced quite the same level of annoyance/rage from anything else, versus hitting a switch and having it either…

Are you saying you would hit the physical switch and it wouldn't activate? I don't think I've ever experienced that.

Early on, I would have command failures when the dimmers were powerline only, but with the dual band ones (RF mesh + powerline) that they have been selling for the last 5+ years I don't think I've ever had an error.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#207

Post by mindslight »

lillecarl wrote: post #203
mindslight wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO x86(_64) machines running a standard Linux distro with ath9k/ath10k cards is the way to go. Embedded access points are crappy, and loading OpenWRT on them just makes them crappy in different ways. I'm sure enterprise gear is better than the consumer stuff on average, but it's still painting myself into a corner. In a similar vein, it pains me to hear people complain about SD issues with Raspberry Pis. My Kodi ter…

The filesystem (ext4) should handle power failures just fine, so a more expensive SD card might do you well. There's a reason some are 5x the price of the cheap ones.

A better SD card would be more expensive. But that doesn't mean if I buy a more expensive SD card it will be better. I've already been using name brand consumer ones like Samsung EVO+. And I don't have the patience to dig through spec sheets on Digikey to see which ones purport to handle power loss gracefully and then do web research to find out if they actually live up to that claim.

My next use of RPis (security cameras) will just use SD to load the kernel/initrd, and then run from nfsroot.

BTW this hasn't been a once a month problem, maybe once a year. But once a year is still too often for me, as I would assume it would be for anyone who relied on one to control their lights.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#208

Post by snapetom »

rootusrootus wrote: post #187
snapetom wrote: post #185

I have a similar set up using AeoTech Z-Stick on a Raspberry Pi running HomeAssistant with Jasco light switches. I'm ready to toss the whole setup, too. First off, HomeAssistant is not as easy as people claim. They love to release breaking changes. You have to read the release notes or else a routine pip update will foobar your whole system. In the four years, I've run it, they have 1) Introduced and then retired a r…

Sounds like you have a similar setup to me. I'm running HA with mostly Jasco switches. It's been okay, but there have been hiccups. Z-Wave devices can be annoying -- ESPECIALLY door locks. I've gotten them all working, but the setup was finicky, mostly due to the security requirements. The only way I deal with HA breaking changes is that I don't update often. About once every couple years I've gone in, dedicated a co…

Yeah, I'm probably sticking with HA for the time being mainly because I don't have the time to redo the whole thing right now. It's just frustrating to hear people recommend HA to complete home automation noobs with little or no linux experience.

Related to that, I keep the HA configs routinely backed up. I should probably switch to nightly backups because HA now manipulates those config files when setting changes are done through the UI. Every once in a while, I shutdown the system and completely clone the Pi SD Card image to save elsewhere. I (thankfully) haven't had to restore from this in a while, but before switching to a durable SD card, I had to do it with every power failure.

Backsups, cloning, industrial cards. Again, I have no clue how a non-linux user could even begin to use HA.

I'll checkout the TP-Link switches. Thank you!

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#209

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #97
dkarp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked into automatic sprinkler systems with scheduling based on the weather or moisture sensors, but they to have too many failure modes: moisture sensors corroding, incorrect weather readings, blocked outlets. I'm now planning to use a simple drip irrigation system. A long hose with nozzles plugged into the mains water that has to be manually turned on. It may not be automatic, but turning things on and off wh…

You're right, a drip irrigation system is much better. You wouldn't have to run regions, either, just one system. But watch out for squirrels and other fur-bearin varmints chewing on the pipes. I'd consider copper pipes. I was thinking about digging up my whole sprinkler system and replacing it all with copper pipes, but then just opted to abandon the whole thing.

[deleted]

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#210

Post by ComputerGuru »

quickthrowman wrote: post #198
ComputerGuru wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NM wiring is extremely common in every state (except for Illinois) and NM is allowed without restrictions in multi-family stick-built housing up to four stories. You must live in Chicago or some other restrictive AHJ. There are still existing functional knob and tube wiring systems that are 100 years old

> (except for Illinois)

Guess where I am ;-)

(Not in Chicago/Cook, though.)

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