Always Do A Wiring Diagram!

[Onoff]

Done in a rush about 15+ years ago when work took precedence over children. Probably on the fly/back of a fag packet. (At work I'm totally anal about wiring diagrams being left in panels). Also I didn't number anything! 

 

From memory the motors run on 24vdc (4 batteries) and the headlights on 12vdc (1 battery). The trailer plug allows charging of all 5 batteries at 12vdc via a golf cart charger. A link plug makes makes everything 24vdc again.

 

Can't find the wiring diagram if I even did one one for love nor money!

 

 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Inside the door of our water treatment shed:

 

 

I've also put together a folder with diagrams and explanatory notes for pretty much everything in the house.  Taken a fair bit of time to do, but I suspect it would take longer to try and work things out by reverse engineering them at a later date.

[Onoff]

11 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Inside the door of our water treatment shed:

 

 

I've also put together a folder with diagrams and explanatory notes for pretty much everything in the house.  Taken a fair bit of time to do, but I suspect it would take longer to try and work things out by reverse engineering them at a later date.

 

Smartarse! ?

[Carrerahill]

36 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Inside the door of our water treatment shed:

 

 

I've also put together a folder with diagrams and explanatory notes for pretty much everything in the house.  Taken a fair bit of time to do, but I suspect it would take longer to try and work things out by reverse engineering them at a later date.

Looks good, I am going to do an O&M manual for our house when I am done - sad, I know.

 

I have left so many extras that I may never use like power and lighting circuits, CAT5, water/gas pipes that might be handy one day - only I will know where most of these things are - BT could turn up here and make a mess running a cable across the house in the future, or they wire into the switchroom and then it can be patched out to wherever - but a future owner of this house wouldn't know the half of it.

 

 

[jack]

One nice thing about our Loxone home automation system is that it effectively self-documents as you go along.

 

That said, I still have a spreadsheet that documents every single electrical connection in the house, and it's come in really handy at times.

[ToughButterCup]

40 minutes ago, jack said:

[...] I still have a spreadsheet that documents every single electrical connection in the house, and it's come in really handy at times.

 

That'd be 2 smart-arses then innit?

[MrSniff]

I keep starting to document the various rather disjointed bits of home automation - which sounds rather more impressive than it actually is, but nonetheless everything is in my head which is not a lot of good to MrsSniff if anything happens to me. With our Luxembourg heating system instructions in German (which I have taken a long time to work through), and having upgraded our home networks from the provider routers to Unifi stuff, these should probably be my priority I suspect.

 

I'm impressed by @JSHarris's wiring diagram - did you do it on a dedicated application? Is there anything accessible available to make this easier? 

Edited August 22, 2019 by MrSniff

[Jeremy Harris]

4 minutes ago, MrSniff said:

I'm impressed by the @JSHarris's wiring diagram - did you do it on a dedicated application? Is there anything accessible available to make this easier? 

 

I just drew it in AutoCad, not because that was the best application for this sort of stuff, really because it's on this PC and I've been using it for years, so it was the easiest option.  Pretty much any vector drawing application would do the job OK, preferably one that has a "grid snap" drawing option, as that makes it easier to get a reasonably tidy layout.

[jack]

9 minutes ago, AnonymousBosch said:

That'd be 2 smart-arses then innit?

 

Did I mention that I contributed nothing to the spreadsheet and that it was generated entirely by my electrician? He saw early-on how complex things were going to get, with home automation (sometimes multiple light circuits per room), MVHR, ASHP, blinds, etc, and decided that the only way he'd be able to cope was to meticulously plan it all up front.

 

He also knew that he'd be the one being called back in future years to amend things, so it was in his interest to do a good job documenting things!

 

[Jeremy Harris]

I've made a start at writing a documentation pack for the house, but it's been time consuming pulling all the stuff together and writing something in reasonably descriptive terms.  This is my first draft of the heating, cooling and hot water system documentation (it's in a folder together with the MIs, warranties, etc from the various manufacturers of bits of kit): Heating cooling hot water and ventilation systems.pdf

[ToughButterCup]

1 hour ago, jack said:

 

Did I mention that I contributed nothing to the spreadsheet and that it was generated entirely by my electrician? (...) 

 

 

Top smart - arse then innit? ?

[Ed Davies]

It seems to me that for moderately complicated household wiring and plumbing you need lots of diagrams of three sorts:

 

Logical: nice layout to understand the logic of the system with high voltage/pressure at the top, current flowing downhill, cause and effect going from left to right as is often used for electronic circuits.

 

Mechanical: showing the actual wiring with some indication of the layout, e.g., if there's a row of MCBs in a box then they're shown in a row on the diagram, as in @JSHarris's diagram in his water-treatment shed.

 

Geographical: showing where the wires actually run throughout the house.

 

At the same time software will need to know configuration information about the system. E.g., 1-wire sensor 28E3F2C7010000 measures the study radiator flow temperature. A key tenet of software engineering is the DRY principle [¹]  = don't repeat yourself. If there's one file to update when a change is made it might actually happen; if there are three or four then it's likely some will be missed some times and the whole lot will degenerate into a mess. So, what I'm envisaging is a single text file (maybe actually split into multiple files but processed as one) which sets up the software configuration and also produces various diagrams which could be printed or viewed online. The online views could be “live” in that they'd show actual states of temperature sensors, valves, pumps, batteries, etc, at least as far as the main computer knows them.

 

E.g., I think somewhere on her web site Elke Stangl had a version of these diagrams which showed the actual temperatures and flows in their heat pump system live but I can't find it now.

 

Thinking about this sort of thing is why I'm not overly interested in the existing home automation systems.

 

[¹] I shared an office and house with Dave Thomas when I was a postgrad student.

[Jeremy Harris]

Excellent idea to link all the drawings/documents so that updating is easier, @Ed Davies.  Even whilst I was writing the initial version of the heating, cooling hot water and ventilation guide I made several changes to embedded drawings.  Making sure the drawings in the documentation pack match the current version has been a PITA, especially as I've tended to make small changes to things, amended the drawing, but then forgotten to update the copy that's embedded in the printed document.

[Onoff]

Left my lad to figure my wiring out, which he did. Slapped in a couple of 12V mower batteries in series. Must be 15 years since he's driven it. Can't find one of the drive chains at the mo so it's a bit slow.