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I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

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Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#281

Post by VLM »

Semaphor wrote: post #22
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.

For example, not having to get up and go to the door. I find that extremely convenient when lying in bed, about to sleep. I usually read for a few hours with dark red light, when I’m ready to sleep I can just turn the lights off.

I have an interesting setup with home assistant similar to your needs

Power the bed reading light lamp with a zen15 zooz inline switch which is never shut off but can monitor current and power continuously. So now homeassistant knows when my bed reading light is on or off based on if the lamp is drawing more than 3 watts or less. Which means it can control my ceiling fan appropriately AND dimmable room light bulbs AND mess with the thermostat depending on outside temperature / mode. And maybe other options someday in the future.

Some effort to set up the hardware, maybe 30 lines of YAML automation code, but it is nice and convenient.

I have a "reading desk lamp" in my basement lab that does similar tricks. Desk lamp no current drawn means my soldering iron and some other apparatus has its power removed. Improves safety a little.

If my youngest kid were not an older teen, I've been thinking about wifi/bluetooth presence detection such that my table saw has no electrical power if my phone isn't within X feet of the saw. A kind of similar automation but different opportunity.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#282

Post by VLM »

627467 wrote: post #132

Can someone list productive smart lighting features? I mean: I get smart heating. I get smart ovens. But smart lighting? I can't think of non-gimicky functionality that can be solved by a occupancy sensors.

dumb occupancy sensors are incredibly unreliable.

Smart code based on MAC addresses seen on my wifi, timer based, power drawn by the wireless phone charger next to my bed, door positions and other things added together is not difficult to code or understand, but very reliable.

If I have all that on the input side may as well have it on the output side.

Some sensor work is utterly trivial. Door position plus sun elevation based on NTP accurate clock equals lights on / off in the laundry room. Position of garage door equals garage extra lights on/off kind like a giant fridge door and its fridge light. The complete set of presence code for my home office is a little more elaborate.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#283

Post by andyrew »

casenjo wrote: post #269
nucleardog wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it started with a single wifi lightbulb. My wife often gets into bed with the baby. If the baby falls asleep before the light is off, she doesn't want to get up to have to turn the light off since it will wake the baby. Now she can just turn it off from her phone. Kinda just expanded from there. Now a good chunk of the regularly used bulbs in the house are "smart". Basically what it means is that if you turn a…

> The lights in my office come on when I walk in if it's dark, and when I unlock my computer it shoots a message out over a MQTT broker which my automation takes as "someone is occupying this space now" and leaves them on. When I lock my computer, two minutes later if no motion is sensed it'll turn them off. What did you do to send the message when the computer locks/unlocks? This is an exact use case I could make us…

IOTLink could be used for this: https://iotlink.gitlab.io/

As far as I'm aware it doesn't report locked/unlocked status, but it does report system idle time which you could use for a similar automation.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#284

Post by zrail »

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…

I end-run around the weird HA z-wave integration by using zwave2mqtt running on a pi with my HA running in a VM on a server in my homelab. I haven’t had nearly as many issues after I switched to this setup and it it running.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#285

Post by zrail »

VLM wrote: post #280

I have 30+ zwave devices on my homeassistant and some years experience going back to the X10 and insteon days and here's my comments on the article and other folks comments: 1) TLDR does not like the effort required for hard wiring. Solution I used? Never hard wire end devices. Makes it easy to take it all with me if I move. Pairing is insanely simple and done in infinite comfort in my office chair not on top of a la…

Wait so you have a separate HA for every room in your house? What benefit do you actually get from that?

Edit upon further reflection: I’m doing something very similar. I have one bad mesh right now with lots of repeaters to transit my ridiculously long house.

The house is a barbell with the “house” part on one end and an office on the other, separated by a garage, with a detached shed in the back yard. My plan is to put a zwave stick + raspberry pi running zwave2mqtt in every “building envelope”, so four total. Those will all talk to an mqtt broker colocated with my singular HA instance.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#287

Post by fyfy18 »

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…

Are the originals German style modular switches (e.g. https://new.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/low-voltag...)? If so, what did you replace them with as I haven't seen any ZigBee switches that fit those.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#288

Post by shaftway »

hondadriver wrote: post #218
t0mas88 wrote: post #118

Earlier 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…

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.

Lutron used to make an amazing switch that worked with Hue. It was the Lutron Connected Bulb Remote. You hot-wire the switches behind the wall plate, and screw in a panel that sits right behind the rocker hole. The remote then slots into that. They're great, and when the battery dies you can just pop them out and change it without taking the wallplate off.

If they were held in by magnets then I'd call them the perfect switch for the Hue series.

Unfortunately they discontinued them, and on the used market they're often >$100 per switch.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#289

Post by crooked-v »

ydant wrote: post #273
crooked-v wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd really like to find is some variety of smart switch with a mode change between 'control the wall circuit' and 'leave the wall circuit always on and send commands over the network', so that the same switch hardware can be used everywhere but you can change the mode for specific circuits that have smart bulbs. I have no idea how one would design this in an intuitive way, though.

Inovelli (Z-Wave) supports this - https://inovelli.com/ They have a competitor whose name I can't remember that does the same thing. If you never program the switch, it behaves just like a regular switch. If you program the switch, you can specify if it will trigger the relay, or just send z-wave commands. There's even a physical override switch you can pull out to cut power in case you have it programmed in "soft" m…

From having just stumbled upon it, it looks like Insteon switches can behave similarly, and have the additional nice touch of syncing the indicator LEDs between multiple switches if you wire/configure them correctly.

Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System

#290

Post by toast0 »

toast0 wrote: post #263
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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. It depends on your system. If you're running old school shared medium Ethernet (with hubs, not switches, for cat5), or even just half-duplex mode, if your run length is too long, the big issue is that you've lost guarantees about col…

Oh, and one more thing. If there's a midpoint somewhat accessible, there are two-port PoE powered switches you can drop in the middle of the span; some of them even will chain PoE; I think i've seen something that would let you put in three of the chainable switches between the power source and your endpoint (you could probably chain a couple more if the endpoint is also a powered switch).

It would certainly make network engineers cry, but you have to work with the site and wiring you have, and only sometimes is it easy or convenient to run new cabling.

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