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I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

robdobson.com

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Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#211

Post by grecy »

quickthrowman wrote: post #193
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…

> 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…

More than that, there are laws (at least in Australia) about how data cables must be run.

Similar to how close an electrical outlet can be to a sink, there are rules about how close a data cable can be to a current-carrying cable.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#212

Post by vr46 »

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…

Those are all reasonable comments, I have spent the last two years doing up my own house, but that is NOT what robdobson.com did.

Note: "Since Lorenzo (the sparky) was replacing most of the wiring in the house I managed to get him to bring a lot of the control cables together in around five separate locations."

Granted, not ALL the wiring, but enough that there are "at least three (control) units lost in the walls" that don't control anything.

The lack of access in a house to critical infrastructure is why that critical infrastructure has simplicity and reliability as its primary characteristic, and if you are going to experiment, maybe consider redundancy? The writer appears to have a lot of hardware expertise, and almost none about systems. Single point of failure? Check. Closed hardware systems that might be unsupported sometime soon? Check. No diagnostics? Check.

This was a fascinating project and I commend the writer for posting all the hairy details, but I am slightly appalled at the wastage.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#213

Post by noodlesUK »

t0mas88 wrote: post #118
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…

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…

Please tell me what switches you are using. Are you in Europe or in the US?

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#215

Post by maxerickson »

michaelt wrote: post #159
ur-whale wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In houses than are typically built with a wooden frame. From a European pov, that sounds like a recipe for fire.

Americans love building single-storey detached houses on big lots. And when they build an upper floor, they love complex roof systems where almost every upper floor window has a first floor roof or porch below it. This means problems like fires spreading to adjacent buildings and fires trapping people where they can't escape are much reduced; you'd never see a repeat of the great fire of London in an American suburb…

I'm curious how you'd compare the Great Chicago Fire (that happened ~200 years later)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire

The same day, a forest fire ravaged a number of small towns:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshtigo_fire

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#216

Post by Shebanator »

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

I still have some knob and tube wiring in my home (which is 96 years old). I've ripped out most of it over the years, but it is amazing how reliable it actually is.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#217

Post by jader201 »

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…

> I considered these systems when my house was built, and am very glad I didn't get them.

You don’t need an elaborate, complex system to get a pretty big benefit from a little automation.

I just built a home, and bought and had the electrician install Lutron Caseta light switches for most of the switches (just the ones we might want to automate, not switches like closets or bathrooms).

Doing this has allowed us to even just turn off lights that were left on without having to get up, or turn on some exterior lighting at sunset/off at sunrise.

Pretty easy to set up, just works, and no overhead/undoing if you want to just use them as normal switches.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#218

Post by hondadriver »

t0mas88 wrote: post #118
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…

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…

Can you please provide a name /brand of the switches you use?

Friends of Hue (Gira and others) with EnOcean comes close, but you'll typically bridge the switch AC wires, so there is nothing to pull out and manually control things as backup.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#219

Post by laacz »

I've been thinking and experimenting with making my home smarter. There is one main rule.

When building such systems one thing must be done always. It must work when there is no smart component to that system.

For example, if your smart home stops working or startes to glitch, it should still be possible to go to a switch and turn that light on.

This can be easily done when building a house or doing renovations. Retrofitting, however, very much depends on way your switches, lights and other related things are wired and installed.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#220

Post by bmurphy1976 »

somehnguy wrote: post #188
WalterBright wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a wifi access point in the house to supplement the lan, and so I don't have to use the data plan for my phone. The durned thing needs to be power cycled now and then. No way I'm putting the lights on wifi. The wired lan is 10x more reliable, but even it needs the router rebooted. (I've had lots of routers. All needed rebooting.) Never had to reboot the lights or the power sockets.

Stop buying consumer networking devices and the reboot problem goes away. Last I checked my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X uptime was just over 2 years. 0 issues. Same with the Unifi APs I use in my house.

I have to reboot at least one of our Ubiquiti switches each month on our office network. I'm very skeptical of Ubiquiti hardware. We had similar problems with their access points and swapped to them out for Cisco Merakis. I don't recall ever having to reboot our Meraki access points or firewall.
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