MikeSharp01

Current limit driving of the LEDs is, as @jack says, perhaps the best way forward as you can keep the voltage well above the forward voltage lower limit and just control how much current the LEDs receive and therefore drive them right down to off. Sadly it requires more infrastructure to manage it. Perhaps the best way is to get intelligent bulbs as they rectify the AC and then current control the LEDs so can go down to off but require communications, Wifi, Zigbee, Z-wave, Bluetooth ... to control the brightness, and often colour. Alternatively you could stick with mains dimming and: have fewer lamps on at all if you want lower light, get lower output bulbs so they are not bright at full power or live with the lower limit.

The challenge with mains dimming LEDs is the forward voltage of the LEDs themselves, the circuit configuration of the LEDs, the rise across the rectifier, the passive current limiting, and the dimming strategy used. In mains driven off the shelf LED bulbs the best we can expect it a floor in the dimming level for smooth operation. Each LED in the bulb will need a voltage across it, known as the forward voltage, before it will turn on and if they are wired, in the lamp, in series - which is the preferred choice because parallel needs very closely matched LEDs, then those voltages add up so you need at least that voltage to turn them on. Given that the forward voltage of an LED varies by colour - because the band gaps needed varies by colour and manufacturer so the turn on voltage varies. White LEDs have the highest forward voltage of most LEDs (UV LEDs are higher) at over 4.5V if driven hard (which you will when used in lighting) so if you have 16 of them all in series then you are going to need 72V to turn them on. (Image Source Wikipedia) When you rectify - turn it from AC to DC you get approximately 1.4 x the AC voltage out so 240V AC in becomes approximately 330V DC out (in a perfect world) - its a thing so don't worry about it. So we have 330V to play with, carefully, but we also have a lower limit of 72V if we want the LEDs on at all. So this gives us 72V as a percentage of 330V which is approximately 22% (Where I got my expectation of the 20% in the above post) but it is not as simple as that. Trailing edge dimmers, the ones most admired in this application, cut the AC cycle off to a varying degree so for most of the cycle the peak, although truncated, is still above that required to provide 72V after rectification but as it gets towards the end of the wave form the peak remaining is not enough to generate the 72V after the rectifier and the whole thing falls to bits. Image source: www.ledsupply.com/blog/dimming-leds-guide-how-to-tell-if-your-lights-are-dimmable/ The fact that the lamps get a bit jiggy when you approach this point is down to a combination of a heap of factors which I won't go into but include the fact that the forward voltage required to turn the led drops as the available current drops, as it must when the voltage drops across a fixed current limiting resistor and the ability of the smoothing capacitor to bridge across the tops of the spikes given the now very limited charge voltage and charge times.

Seems quite high, and somewhat disappointing, I was hoping they would get down to about 20% - they won't fade to / from black with a trailing edge system as @jack says. I suppose it could be a function of the bulbs you are using - the circuitry won't be common to them all and perhaps some are better than others.

Yes but heading for robots and all kinds. The ones I have seen in UK and Germany have robots assembly cells, CNC wood cutting etc. Old shed won't cut it, pardon the pun. going forward. We need to invest in automation so fewer people can get more done - for the mass market. I am the robots on our build.

We went for Stick built with 300mm I beams, filled with blown cellulose, and added a thin layer of PU on the outside which meant we got our target U value with a small amount of oil based product and a bit thinner. So far this winter without heating it has never dropped below 8 deg C and we still don't have the outer cladding on some of the walls and none of the plaster board inside both of which will further improve it. So our total thickness when all done is 460mm.

If they have half a commercial brain they will have an encrypted connection you can't break without enormous effort so when they want to monetise it they will hold all the cards.

The output of the dimmer driving the SSR sounds like a problem as the dimmer won't be plain on/off it will be a series of pulses / a shaped waveform unless you can set it to be just on/off - it might get upset being turned on / off at 1000 times a second. It won't draw any /much current either. Is the SSR OK to get a 24v signal?

Why on earth are you using a dimmer channel to drive a blind? Why not just a relay or a straight SSR controlled from a Loxone output.

Let's hope @MVHRDesigner is out there looks like they know their stuff.

Welcome Jon. This is THE forum for people like us. We are all nice people on here, well mostly! Why not start a new topic - 'Repairing the Sentinel Kinetic Plus' and share the story so far. Any ideas why it stopped working? For it to fail completely usually means a fault common to both fans - so the controller somewhere perhaps or it maybe that if one fan fails the other is prevented from running by the controller.

Was it an incandescent lamp or a LED. If the former then it is entirely possible that the blub going will cause a current spike. Triping both the CU and the fuse is unlucky but not impossible given the right circumstances.

Do you have a circuit diagram somewhere - it should be easy to work out where the GND goes from that!? In general - and I would not advise it without understanding the LV circuits, you can safely connect all the 24V grounds together PROVIDED you are not in need of isolation IE you may have an DC-DC converter in there somewhere that has isolation as a feature and the you would not want to bridge out that isolation by commoning the 24V GNDs. You should NOT directly (indirectly via failover switching systems and / or diodes might is possible) common the 24V positives from the various power supplies under any circumstances.

Or eat too much Avocado! I had some elderly relatives lived in one of the Wandsworth pre-fabs and they said they loved it and he was a construction professional - structural engineer. I stayed there for a short while when I was about 8 and had a great week - some of the kids in the street still lived in bomb damaged houses just along from it.

Yes Berkely Homes has also closed its very hi-tech factory in Dartford because it cannot make it pay, and they are volume house builders so industrialisation should be a natural progression. How come we managed to make this work in the 1940's but seem unable to make it work today with all the advanced technologies that could be applied.

HI and welcome to THE forum for people like us. We set out on broadly the same premise in 2015 and purchased a plot, with a semi derelict dwelling, with a view to doing something. Now we are getting towards the end - last 10% takes 90% of the time. Look forward to hearing more about it and remember - there is no such thing as a silly question.

What are the chimneys for though?

That looks very tidy that UVC.

Wow - How is that achieved? I thought PH windows were 0.8 or better - ours are 0.78. Not sure how you could construct a .15 window you can see through.

Have you looked at knock down and re-building in sections so you live in the remainder and move over to the first bit of build as it is finished and in the end you have rebuilt it? Would take some organising but might be made to work out.

Yes we purchased our windows as two packages, ground floor and first floor, as the total was over £30k to ensure we got the cover as we had to pay it all up front at some stage or another.

You can get what I suspect is the chip from mouser - https://www.mouser.co.uk/new/texas-instruments/ti-mmwave-iwr6x-sensors/ Alternatively if you just want to watch one person SEEED studio do a 24GHz (and here, apropos another thread this morning, I think we use a capital G although I have forgotten why) is one I have been experimenting with! It works OK but fine tuning is proving interesting - its a pain adjusting settings while lying down to get it to detect a fall!

@jimboflint19 Steamy is one of our most diligent sources of support in energy matters, indeed almost anything involving algebra, and as he will point out, I fell over this last week - and I should know better, if it is a unit named after a person then it is capatalised when used as a unit - so watts (not capitalised in a sentence unless it starts the sentence), because it is named after James Watt, otherwise it is generally not. Hence 24kWh = Twenty four kilowatt hours. More here: https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/writing-si-metric-system-units#:~:text=NOT 250 mms.-,Capitalization,modifier "Celsius" is capitalized.

Does this include Domestic Hot Water?

I have one of those does the whole of our acre all on its tod.

Thanks one and all think that gives me a clear steer. Had forgotten to have a spare outlet for things like fill loops. At least now I can crack on.