Retrofit wired smart lighting

[SamP20]

I've recently bought a small 3 bedroom house in Bristol. I'm looking to retrofit a wired semi-permanent smart lighting system that could easily be removed or made dumb when I eventually sell again. Also the home automation system in general is going to be a hobby project, and I'm quite competent with software and electronics engineering. I think my motives are not to dissimilar to those over at SuperHouseTV. With that being said has anyone else done anything similar?

 

My current plan of thought is to use these AC DMX Dimmers underneath each light fixture and pull a load of cat5 cable to a central location. I've already done this to some extent with cat6 ethernet wiring. Some of you might have better ideas however which I'd be interested to hear.

 

Also see attached a crudely drawn diagram of the existing ground floor wiring. First floor I'm not so worried about as access is incredibly easy from the loft.

[joth]

On 31/05/2020 at 23:54, SamP20 said:

My current plan of thought is to use these AC DMX Dimmers underneath each light fixture and pull a load of cat5 cable to a central location.

 

I'd be wary of this because DMX is intended for a daisy chain rather than star topology, and has a limited line length. Long runs can become very intermittent and tricky to debug. For this reason I'm putting almost all my DMX dimmers in the central cabinet and radially wiring a  star topology of 1.0mm2 T&E to each fixture. I'm somewhat reluctantly using mains level dimming just for simplicity & easy availability of the bulbs, however I'd probably use DALI if wanting to put the dimming drivers near each fixture. On the plus side wiring the mains radially does make it easy to switch to a dumb lighting design.

 

For a few places I'm using low voltage leds I will probably put the 24v dimmer next to the led strip and use a DMX amplifier/splitter to keep each of the runs isolated from each other. 

The whole market is pushing wireless systems more an more, even for new builds, so doing wired install in a retrofit is going against the grain. 

[SamP20]

Doing a mains radial system was my second thought. What sort of cable are you wiring to each light switch? Is that also T&E or is it smaller signal cable such as cat5? For my setup I'd prefer signal cable as one of my plans is to build some custom switch plates with either rotary encoders or touch displays. Dumbing down such a system would require either pulling some T&E to each switch, or replacing the smart dimmers with dumb relays. Although a bit non-standard, the relays shouldn't be too bad as long as I use a trustworthy brand.

 

I am also planning to convert the living room lights to a set of downlights as I use the room for VR a lot and collisions are an issue. For those I would probably run the ELV wiring straight back to the cabinet, then I can use any driver I like.

[joth]

Current thinking is to run accessible conduit to all switches I can, and pull cat5. For those I can't duct it'll be T&E *and* cat5, for future flexibility

Ideally, light switches should have a neutral now anyway (if you want to allow for future use of wireless switches) but 3+E plus cat5 is starting to get ridiculous...