Lighting circuit - is there a better alternative - starfish circuit?

[readiescards]

Just working on electrical socket and lighting circuit design.

 

Am just wondering if I run all the switch cables and lighting supplies back to a central point, it means I can configure the arrangement of what switch feeds which light points post plastering.  Allowing me to add fancy control systems later without hacking the walls apart.  Like a sort of star(fish) network

 

Question: Can that be done without being overly complex for the electrician/buidling control?

[ProDave]

It's the way it was always done in the 1960's, known as the spider method.  There is nothing wrong with it apart from you have to put the junction box somewhere accessible. The wiring regs don't specify how to wire a lighting circuit so still perfectly legal.  Make sure you label everything and do all your switch drops from the junction box in 3 core & earth in case that switch is ever used for 2 way switching, and label every cable as it enters the jnction box, a sharpie pen is good.
 

[Nickfromwales]

Also it's how all the more complex folk wire their intelligent lighting systems. 

All lights run back to one location and switched accordingly by a multi-channel dimmer / switching pack. . 

If there is a bedroom, with one light and one or two switches ( wall + bedside ) then maybe overkill for that but for multiple lights in a given area ( liv / dine combined open space ) then deffo a good idea imo. 

[Mackers]

I'd go with DALI or do it PoE

[Nickfromwales]

33 minutes ago, Mackers said:

I'd go with DALI or do it PoE

For the benefit of the uninitiated ( and me ) can you elaborate a bit please ?   

[Onoff]

POE is Power Over Ethernet. DALI is a standard that a lot of makers adhere to = Digital Address Lighting Interface. Simtronic, Thorn, Clipsal are a couple to conjure with. 

 

Where I work uses Simtronics and has a dedicated  pc. Benefits are energy savings on a massive scale as you can schedule when lights come on / go off and take care remotely of all the offices where people have gone home but left the lights on. Some places even use the office lighting as a pseudo night time "billboard" treating each area as a giant pixel. You could even switch whole floors in a skyscraper to create a Knightrider effect.

 

At "our" end of things.....dunno.....turn the kids lights off once they're asleep via your smart phone without having to get up! Once you've verified via CCTV they are indeed akip! Put lights on for somebody to come home to if you're out. Its endless really.

 

 

Edited September 17, 2016 by Onoff

[Nickfromwales]

Cheers. 

Re the kids rooms, I have a much cheaper system where I shout up the stairs and tell them to turn the lights off. I wouldn't recommend that system tbh as it's quite unreliable and gets mixed results

Best alert system for the kids, if the second shout for their food has gone unanswered, is to take their Cat5 cables out of the router . They come down like a fire drill then. 

 

Unless going fully automated with an intelligent system, I'd probably only go for this radial, single point wiring downstairs. @readiescards, are you going automated ( able to blackout the house from the front door upon exit etc etc ) ? 

 

[SteamyTea]

I swapped out all my 8W CFL last week for 3W LEDs  About the same amount of light (never did a reading but I could for a laugh).

The bayonet LED bulbs came from Poundland, for a £.

So I now have a 38% energy saving.

Cost me £8

 

If I left 2 lights on 24/7, that would be about £8 for a year.

 

So how much do these systems cost?

Edited September 17, 2016 by SteamyTea

[Nickfromwales]

3 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

If I left 2 lights on 24/7, that would be about £8 for a year.

 

So how much do these systems cost?

 

From what I heard from the last intelligent lighting install, A LOT! Supplier was charging the punter for light fittings, and the spark and I were comparing what was available through the merchants, like for like, and the markup was something like 300-400%. That's before buying the system and paying the spark a lot more to run several hundred metres of cable. 

My favourite was the system supplier doing a design ( for a PH ) which included a load of 120w halogen uplighters ?

7 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

The bayonet LED bulbs came from Poundland, for a £.

 

 

 

[SteamyTea]

Got my light meter out, blinds closed (they are not a perfect fit), 3 LUX, LED on, 12 LUX, old CFL 7 LUX initally, 19 LUX after warm up.

 

My point is that there is a lot of nonsense spoken about lighting, light quality and bightness levels, colour etc.

Get yourself to Poundland.

 

Edit, just opened the blinds, got a light reading of 20 LUX

 

Edit 2, 15 minutes later the reading is 8 LUX

Edited September 17, 2016 by SteamyTea

[curlewhouse]

Must admit that for brightness levels, after trying to get my head round what 1 or 10 or 20 LUX actually looks like, and how big an area it would light at what level etc, when buying  LED bulbs I now buy just one first and see what it looks like. Not very scientific, I know, but it works for me. I've also found some variation in makes of LED which both claim the same lux level.

Edited September 17, 2016 by curlewhouse

[Mackers]

Are you saying your getting as low as 20lux with the blinds open? That's very very low, what time of day was that. 

 

Yes DALI is overkill for domestic but I'm talking about doing your own DALI system or PoE controlling the LEDs. I'm working on one at the minute and it's as cheap as chips.

[SteamyTea]

2 hours ago, Mackers said:

Are you saying your getting as low as 20lux with the blinds open?

Yes, it is NE facing window, with the one infront blocked of with part of my boat (great living alone, you can build a boat in the kitchen).

It was about 8 or 9 this morning I seem to remember.

 

My main point is that you don't really need a lot of light to do most things, just let your iris do the work.

[readiescards]

To be honest I was thinking of a ultra simple old telephone exchange style 'patch board' so I can reconfigure easily.

 

Maybe with some basic timers to kill things after 'lights out'.  

[Barney12]

If you are serious about star wiring to allow future proofing for automated/intelligent lighting etc then bare in mind that a lot of the systems use CAT5 for control. Thus if you really want to future proof then take a run of cat5 to each switch point too.

 

Ive self installed Clipsal C-Bus three times now. It really is bl00dy simple to install and configure. All your loads come back to dimmers or relays at the consumer unit (or alternative node zero) and control (switches, PIR's etc etc) run on CAT5 which can be series, star or a combination of both. 

[Barney12]

10 hours ago, readiescards said:

To be honest I was thinking of a ultra simple old telephone exchange style 'patch board' so I can reconfigure easily.

 

Maybe with some basic timers to kill things after 'lights out'.  

 

I friend of mine wired his children's bedrooms with kill switches which take out lighting, power and their dedicated wifi network  He even has them on a timer.

 

mind you as @Nickfromwales said my Dad always had a lower cost method. If he had got to the stage where he had asked (yelled) for the third time you were deep in the doodoo!!