You know... light switches ain’t so bad. All this pain in the ass and expense, I don’t understand it. I want less of this in my life. These piles of shit we make with computers are worse than useless. We just make more and more mess.
I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
121–130 of 317 posts
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note, this is what I use things but I also have dumb switches to control if things fail. I also dont put control in hard to reach places. I just use outdoor sensors + smart bulbs. Use case 1: Open all lights in yard at night when exterior gate is open or motion detected. Shut off after set amount of time of no activity. Use case 2: light in shed/basement/garage on when door is open. Use case 3: control lights via tel…
I have been fortunate to have never been flooded but I'm curious if you got the alarm would the situation turn out much better than if you didn't?
Yes, it really just depends on the circumstances.
At a friend's house at 2am in San Diego, first hard rain in months, outdoor drain that parallel garages cement slopes into was clogged. Water got to be hilariously high, he'd mentioned that before he rented the place his ground level bedroom adjacent to the garage had been remodeled because of a flood. So like, 8 inches high. Anyways, we had thousands of dollars of lithium batteries on the garage floor... shit got dangerously close, and all it took was clearing some leaves out of the drain to fix. If nobody would've happened to be there though, would've been quite the bad situation.
That's a bit not answering your question tho - with regards to alarms tripping, know somebody with a warehouse in Sacramento - owner hadn't been at the shop for a few days, employee had. One night a security alarm trips, he makes the 20 min drive to the shop, turns out the security alarm circuit had shorted from water 4" high water level caused by a paper towel clogging a sink that was left on. Fortunately he had mostly everything on raised shelving.
If you you have a reason to have some alarms, and they go off when you're away, you'll likely be able to say whether or not it's worth it to call emergency services and say literally break my windows and go inside to see what happened. In the case of a burst water pipe or something, they'd be able to shut off your water mains saving you from further damage. That's the jist or so.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#123Earlier 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…
Although that hum is annoying on analog signals, it has no effect on digital high speed communications.
Still I agree it isn’t worth the headache of issues to save $20 and it’s more futureproof to use better cables.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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've had both a switch for the main light (s) and a lamp bedside the bed all my life, multiple houses, none of them 'smart' or wireless. Don't get me wrong - I want to use HomeAssistant or similar - but I don't want to ditch physical switches.
I have physical switches, I just don’t use them. They are my fallback for when the network fails, the hue hub dies or whatever.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#125Earlier 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…
Just out of curiosity, would shielded cat-cables help in a situation where you have it next to A/C wires?
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#126[deleted]
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#127Earlier 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…
I'm curious to understand the advantages/benefits of being able to reassign switches/lights. Surely a light/group-of-lights needs a switch/set-of-switches, but once it's done, what's the imperative for change?
but once it's done, what's the imperative for change
If it's truly done there's no reason for change. However getting there, to what for us is the most optimal configuration, is what was the main incentive for me. The way it is now it requires almost no ahead planning. I.e. for most rooms we had no idea on beforehand how we were going to pupulate them with furniture and which activity we'd do where, so I just went 'cable for lighting in the center, at the side on each wall, and some extra' and then put the switches in sensible places i.e. usually next to room entrance. Then during the next years hook up as needed and adapt if needed. E.g. couple of months ago we needed an extra desk for working form home and one extra for my GF's new hobby, so we just put some desks to a wall and instantly can get a light above it. With a fixed configuration you'd either need to think of that in advance, or use the light centrally in the room which makes you sit in your own shadow. or add lights you just plug in the wall socket but that's extra cable, and especially for desks it's hard to find a suitable one. Also throughout the years I've made small changes here and there to change things like being able to turn on the light in the bathroom from the bedroom, or turn on light in the kitchen from the place where we eat so you don't have to look for th kitchen switch in the dark. Sure those are just nice-to-haves but pretty convenient. I've been and lived in quite a lot of houses where the whole configuration was pretty akward. Though I get some people don't care about that.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#128a few days ago I helped my neighbour install some light fixtures in her house. She was sold some smart lightbulbs with it because you can dim them and change the light color a bit from a remote control. There are 6 or 8 lightbulbs next to each others. I'm impressed how unreliable this tech is. Standing 2 meters away from the lightbulbs, I had to press 3 or 4 times the off button to turn them all off. I just don't und…
Depends on the bulbs. Our Philips Hue bulbs (ZigBee) work perfectly fine. None of the issues you or the OP describes are an issue: they continue to work as regular bulbs if the hub fails, can be paired via Bluetooth app without proximity to the hub, and seem to have a lot of range. Best thing is that no wiring/electrician is necessary.
Same experience here, Philips (and other Zigbee lights like IKEA) did a great job.
Only problem I had with the Philips hub is that it's memory limited and can't handle more than about 50 devices. Above that you need to replace the hub with something like Home Assistant, but can keep the rest of the system.
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had both a switch for the main light (s) and a lamp bedside the bed all my life, multiple houses, none of them 'smart' or wireless. Don't get me wrong - I want to use HomeAssistant or similar - but I don't want to ditch physical switches.
I have physical switches, I just don’t use them. They are my fallback for when the network fails, the hue hub dies or whatever.
What I mean is I think I prefer them even if I were technically set up to use my phone or a remote - they'd never be in the right place so I'd have to get up anyway.
(And in this case the (dumb) switches on the wall have always been in the right place, by the bed, in my bedrooms. (In addition to one by the door of course.))
I'd just have 'the system' 'aware' of the switches and current state etc. so that I could have certain automations, logging, etc.
The physical switches would either be network inputs themselves (easier implementation but reliability concern) or just report events but be electrically connected to the light still; I suppose also light-side state reporting for ultimate reliability (against missed switch events that did change light state because of electrical connection).
Re: I Ripped Out a £6k Lighting System
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't really need a "smart" light for it, a traditional radio-controlled "dumb" light switch is good enough for this purpose. Just press a button, and the remote control sends a RF signal at 433 MHz to switch it on or off, there's no IoT complexity like firmware updates, Linux kernel, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, an Internet connection or other nonsense. It can either be a light switch installed on the wall, or an integrate…
The question was for wireless lights. A radio-controlled dumb-switch used this way is still wireless lightning. And what privacy concerns are there with lights that have no internet connection whatsoever?
First, some context. When I was replying to this thread, there were only three comments, the first said wireless lighting was an useless solution waiting for a problem, another said it was a hobby and not too useful, and only you said it was useful. Hence, it thought it was natural to add some comment under your comment. Furthermore, the original article described how the author designed a Wi-Fi based system, and other readers seemed to have "smart" or "Wi-Fi" lights or lightbulbs in mind when they were expressing their disapproval to wireless lightning, so I thought it was useful to make the point that a remote-controlled light is not necessarily a IoT "smart" light, which constitutes the first paragraph of my reply. And the second paragraph in my reply was my personal opinion to those "Wi-Fi" / "IoT" based lightbulbs - they do have legitimate uses, however they may contain "possible bugs, and privacy concerns" (as in: a Wi-Fi controlled lightbulb with a mobile app), thus "meanwhile I'll keep using my dumb wireless light switch".
I hope my comment makes sense to you now.
> A radio-controlled dumb-switch used this way is still wireless lightning.
Yes, and it was also the point I was trying to make.