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I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

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Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#241

Post by crooked-v »

gh02t wrote: post #175
Maha-pudma wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm replying to myself in an effort to reply generally to everyone who replied to me, thanks for your use cases. I can see some of the reasons and benefits and to me, no offence meant, the seem pretty trivial, especially when you take into account the privacy issues. I have dumb timers for lights I want on at certain times, dumb movement sensors for outside lights that only turn on at night, my boiler has a timer whi…

Regarding privacy issues, IMO if that's a problem you've screwed up big time. Stuff like lights should only use local control and not be tied into the cloud or at least it should be optional, and any lights should fall back to working like normal dumb lights if they lose contact with the hub. When it comes to rolling your own devices with an Arduino or similar, this is much harder to do safely and in a code-compliant…

For commercial systems that will do that, Hue lights work fine on an isolated network, and HomeKit as a broader ecosystem doesn't require an internet connection to work and is explicitly designed to always treat the local hub as the primary controller.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#242

Post by rewtraw »

hamandcheese wrote: post #226

The ONLY wireless lighting system I will ever use is Lutron Caseta light switches. They are magic and don’t require a neutral cable, unlike just about every other smart dimmer, which means they can be swapped in place of literally any light switch in any home. If the Lutron hub is unplugged, the switches continue to operate as normal light switches. They also operate as normal light switches at all other times. So no…

100%. I've been using Lutron Caseta switches & hub for over 5 years and have never once had a single issue -- no matter how minor. The dimmers work like normal even if the wifi is down, and they don't need internet in order to work with HomeKit. I've never once had a switch not work or fail to respond with HomeKit. I have friends with Z-Wave/Zigby/Phillips/etc and they are always talking about how they are finicking with Home Assistant or Smart Things, or how the lights all returned to full brightness after a power outage in the middle of the night.

I want to install my switches and have them work, always. If my wife even once complains, that's a total failure. If a guest can even tell that they are anything but normal dimmers, that's a failure. With my Caseta system, my wife has never complained -- only asked me to install more of them.

And h/t to HomeKit and Home.app. I've tried Google's version (Home) and it's absolute garbage in comparison.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#243

Post by piceas »

brtkdotse wrote: post #28
lqet wrote: post #12

What is a wireless lighting system? What is the advantage of such a system over a switch next to the door? E: A wireless lighting systems seems to be a light bulb with WiFi capabilities.

I’m actually contemplating exchanging all our halogen spotlights (as they’re no longer being sold) to IKEA Trådfri. My rationale for it is that I want to be able to dim them, but exchanging halogens for LEDs would mean the transformer wouldn’t see enough of a load to dim properly. By exchanging everything for IKEA bulbs I save on changing the transformer since the dimming circuit is in each bulb.

I like and have bought into the IKEA system, but I have had a lot of trouble with their gu10 lights.

Some sets of three occasionally go into party mode and start flashing in a sequence. They reset themselves every month or so. I'm tall and my ceilings are not so it's quick for me to pair them again. It would be super annoying if they were too high to reach. Setting the white spectrum fails using the 5 button controller. Often one or two usually fail to set correctly resulting in a weird mix. I simply don't bother anymore. They work nicely with the app, when still paired.

I haven't had any problems with the e27's in the same rooms.

'Dumb' rf motion detector triggered under-counter lighting in the kitchen has been way better bang for buck. It just works. No smart home required.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#244

Post by crooked-v »

Maha-pudma wrote: post #61

I don't get it. What's the point in these systems? Genuinely. Why would I ever need this? Just like a "smart" doorbell, fridge, meter. I would love for someone to be able to explain the benefits to me over the normal, cheap, completely working "dump" version. The only "smart" device I own is a TV and it is crap, worse thing I've ever bought.

For me it's a set of automations that make some of the minor inconveniences of life just sort of magically resolve themselves:

- Automatically closing the skylight shades after sunset (when they just let ambient city night glow in) and open them just before sunrise.

- Automatically opening the window shades just before sunrise.

- Turning on the overhead lights and increasing brightness in several stages during sunrise (my place can be a bit dark because I'm under the eaves, this helps the effect).

- Automatically turning off several light-producing devices (coffeemaker, Instant Pot, etc) via 'smart outlet' when I go to bed in a certain time window, then turning them back on when any light is turned on in the morning. (This second-order automation means they still have the same 'magical' effect even if I disable the other auto-lighting for a day because I desperately need to sleep in.)

- Automatically playing NPR in several rooms the first time I leave the bedroom on a weekday during a certain time window.

All the automation here happens entirely locally via HomeKit, and the only reason the system even needs an internet connection at all is so the Apple TV acting as a hub can get updated sunrise/sunset times. (For a totally self-contained system you'd probably want to grab a cheap iPad to act as the hub instead, wall-mount it, and put it in 'kiosk mode' locked to the Home app.)

For all of this, my Hue lights/smart plugs/motion sensors and the Apple and Sonos speakers have been completely reliable. The Hunter-Douglas skylight shades have been mostly reliable (maybe one or two failures over the course of a year, though I did have to get an RF repeater for that to work well).

The weak point is the window shades, which use generic rebranded functionality from a reseller because most of the industry of window coverings is awful and behind the times. Hunter-Douglas top-down-bottom-up shades are about the best replacement available at the moment for automation purposes (so you can adjust the exact amount of window covered for privacy purposes and do it multiple times per day in a way that would be a massive pain to handle manually), but awfully pricey.

I'm also considering rigging up a proper bed occupancy sensor (basically turning the whole bed into a giant scale with load sensors and triggering events on human-approximate weight being added/removed) to replace the bedroom motion sensor, but I've got one of those Ikea slat-bottomed bedframes that probably wouldn't work very well for that.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#245

Post by dylan604 »

core-questions wrote: post #239
geocrasher wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 2010 I designed the "computer room" for a 3 story apartment building that had computers for the residents to use. It was all very basic. The only complexity was that the ethernet run was across the whole building and 3 stories from the 3rd story computer room to the first story utility room. The day came when it was time to test it out. All the Ethernet lights came on, but throughput was on the order of less t…

I was confused as all get-out about what a "wire nut" is, turns out Marettes are not what everyone calls 'em!

without looking it up, sounds like you are referring the brand name or the manufacture/distributor of wire nuts available at your local hardware store.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#246

Post by abstractbarista »

Wow, this guy is either willfully ignorant of ZWave technical realities, or just doesn't have as much knowledge in the realm as he purports to have.

Basically every gripe listed has to do with using old original ZWave devices. If you started a 150-node mesh today with strictly ZWave+ devices, an Aotec ZWave hub, and perhaps Home Assistant to control and automate it all, you'd have a much more consistently positive experience.

So I'm left boiling down the complaints to "I was an early adopter, so I got stuck with the crappy stuff, boo!"

Also, if you're paying >$50USD per common ZWave fixture (like a dimmer, stuff like pool controllers can be more), you're seriously doing something wrong.

Oh well, to each their own. I have a mesh of about 50 nodes across 2 stories, and it all works great. Can't remember the last time I had to turn a light on when I entered a room. Among many other nice touches, which I am fine expending a bit more effort to upkeep than normal 'analog' dumb homes.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#247

Post by abstractbarista »

hamandcheese wrote: post #226

The ONLY wireless lighting system I will ever use is Lutron Caseta light switches. They are magic and don’t require a neutral cable, unlike just about every other smart dimmer, which means they can be swapped in place of literally any light switch in any home. If the Lutron hub is unplugged, the switches continue to operate as normal light switches. They also operate as normal light switches at all other times. So no…

ZWave switches and dimmers also continue to work fine without the hub.

I do enjoy Caseta's smooth dimming and "nice touch" switch controls however.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#248

Post by youngtaff »

grecy wrote: post #211
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…

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.

In the UK CBus have CAT5 cable that's rates for installation alongside mains cables (back of lightswitches etc) https://www.cbusdirect.co.uk/cbus-product-range/cbus-cable-a...

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#249

Post by Thlom »

petre wrote: post #173
stinos wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry should have been more clear; I'm an eletronics engineer so I know what crosstalk is, it's just that I didn't understand how this would be an actual problem with CAT5. Phone line, that's something else though. If an electrician had done it, it likely would have been 10 or 20x more. Hmm, that is like twice the amount one would typcially pay here. Still, don't froget the working hours you put in there :) plus the…

That's an easy one. Switch on the light, network disconnects. We had this happen at our office. There's obviously much more happening on an electrical network other than 50/60 Hz, like transient response to switching loads on and off, RF noise from spark loads, dimmers etc.

In digital cinema the projector and the playback server does a handshake and key exchange before you can play encrypted content.The rest of this story might not be entirely correct, I've been out of the business for a few years and this happened maybe 5-6 years ago, but it's a bit fun and kind of relevant.

This usually works without any issues, but on one type of projector they had used a non-shielded network cable internally in the projector and if the projector lamp was lit juuuust at the right moment, the handshake would fail and the film would not play. Normally it wouldn't be a huge deal as the handshake happens just before the film and the lamp is usually lit on the beginning of the show long before the film starts. HOWEVER, there was this one cinema chain that had standardized their playlists in such a way that they for some stupid reason turned of the projector lamp in between the trailers and the film (I think to "introduce" the film) and then turned it on again just before the film with the result that the handshake failed 3 out of 10 times or so.

Long term solution was to replace the shoddy cable. Short term solution was to change all their playlist templates to blind the lamp instead of turning it off. Like they should have done to begin with.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#250

Post by MaxBarraclough »

walshemj wrote: post #233
geocrasher wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 2010 I designed the "computer room" for a 3 story apartment building that had computers for the residents to use. It was all very basic. The only complexity was that the ethernet run was across the whole building and 3 stories from the 3rd story computer room to the first story utility room. The day came when it was time to test it out. All the Ethernet lights came on, but throughput was on the order of less t…

They did use the correct wiring standard T-568B ? and the runs where < 90m

> and the runs where What happens if you somewhat exceed the 100m limit? The only sources I can find boil down to just don't do that but I can't find a chart showing what happens to performance/frame loss.

Would it help to have a heavily shielded cable?

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