Critique my home automation cabinet wiring

[Rob99]

Thanks for the plug @joth  always happy to help.?? 

 

Glad to see you're getting your head round everything, and that's a really neat bit of wiring work in the cabinet (oh I can supply those too!!)

 

@Thorfun building and wiring up the main cabinet isn't that difficult as long as you take your time and think about component locations and wiring before you start. I mount cabinets on an angled jig to do all the wiring and its much easier than trying to do it when they're on the wall. Let me know if you need any pointers.

 

 

[Thorfun]

1 hour ago, Rob99 said:

Thanks for the plug @joth  always happy to help.?? 

 

Glad to see you're getting your head round everything, and that's a really neat bit of wiring work in the cabinet (oh I can supply those too!!)

 

@Thorfun building and wiring up the main cabinet isn't that difficult as long as you take your time and think about component locations and wiring before you start. I mount cabinets on an angled jig to do all the wiring and its much easier than trying to do it when they're on the wall. Let me know if you need any pointers.

 

 

Thanks @Rob99  I’m sure I’ll be in touch a little further down the line when I have time to dedicate to the planning of the home automation. 
 

I notice you’re in West Sussex too, which is convenient. 

[Rob99]

Always happy to help 

[osmononame]

I am a relative newbie when it comes to home automation but what would be the advantages of these dimmer switches vs something ZigBee. I was thinking of wiring my house with Xiaomi ZigBee switches and controlling through HA. Does this offer something similar or have I got wrong end of the stick?

[joth]

1 hour ago, osmononame said:

I am a relative newbie when it comes to home automation but what would be the advantages of these dimmer switches vs something ZigBee. I was thinking of wiring my house with Xiaomi ZigBee switches and controlling through HA. Does this offer something similar or have I got wrong end of the stick?

 

ZigBee, zwave, BLE, enOcean, even lutron etc are all wireless (or going that way) which is great for retrofitting but personally I want wired connections to my switches.  If you're happy with wireless then I hear those things are getting quite good.

The other thing loxone adds is a central controller that's tolerably easy to learn. This allows programming complete lighting scenes all in one places, and overseeing all the automations across the house. ZigBee lets you connect things up but you'd need another system on top of it to get the same level of automation and control.

 

[osmononame]

38 minutes ago, joth said:

 

ZigBee, zwave, BLE, enOcean, even lutron etc are all wireless (or going that way) which is great for retrofitting but personally I want wired connections to my switches.  If you're happy with wireless then I hear those things are getting quite good.

The other thing loxone adds is a central controller that's tolerably easy to learn. This allows programming complete lighting scenes all in one places, and overseeing all the automations across the house. ZigBee lets you connect things up but you'd need another system on top of it to get the same level of automation and control.

 

 

Do you know if the controller can be integrated into HA? 

[Peter vB]

@joth the central hub distribution board you build (amazing work) looks exactly the same principle I am planning to build next year, when our house will be rewired and new consumer unit installed. I've read and compared the wired based intergation systems but failed to find any schematic(wiring diagram) examples for the distribution panel.

Did you draw up drawings before you started your construction? or did you have sameone else do them?

Any help of examples would be much appreciated, or direct me in the write direction.

 

[joth]

2 hours ago, Peter vB said:

@joth the central hub distribution board you build (amazing work) looks exactly the same principle I am planning to build next year, when our house will be rewired and new consumer unit installed. I've read and compared the wired based intergation systems but failed to find any schematic(wiring diagram) examples for the distribution panel.

Did you draw up drawings before you started your construction? or did you have sameone else do them?

Any help of examples would be much appreciated, or direct me in the write direction.

 

 

Thanks :o)

Afraid the schematic is all in my head. I have at least tried to document which dimmer module is on what channel. Once I map them to rooms / lights (got the finial lighting schedule agreed this week, so that's coming soon! *) I'll try and get a bit of whole-house high level schematic.

In my head  it's still very simple: Loxone miniserver drives DMX extension which drives 16x 2ch mains dimmers and 2x 24ch 24V dimmers. Plus a bit of fluff for sensor inputs, alarm system interfacing. I followed their blog article for the overall schema.

 

* - Amazingly I was sure 32 channels of mains dimming would be enough, but turns out I currently need 40! I'm going to shift some stuff onto a low-voltage constant current drivers in the cabinet, rather than do them ALL via mains dimmers and drivers next to the fittings.

 

 

Edited October 23, 2020 by joth

[Peter vB]

Brilliant,

I look forward to seeing/hearing about your project as it enterers the final straight.

[Thorfun]

@joth how's it going? just wondering how your first fix is going with the Loxone stuff? as far as I remember you were doing it about now.

[joth]

4 hours ago, Thorfun said:

@joth how's it going? just wondering how your first fix is going with the Loxone stuff? as far as I remember you were doing it about now.

Yup we're just onto tiling and mist coating this week.

I had our electrician pull most the cables, started off ok but they're a bit old school so pulling Cat6 cable one drop at a time became kinda rediculous with joist notching etc in the end they got the hang of identifying the main cabling "highways"" and pulling through a decent bundle of cable at once. I suggested daisy chaining a maximum of three switches/motion sensors per Tree drop, but left them to devise there own plan for the order of looping them which became rather crazy grouping things up by device type rather than room for unknown reasons, which massively increased the quantity of Cat6 used. 

I had a lot of other things on my plate during it all so was trying not to micro manage... In the end I had to anyway as they kinda lost the will to keep track of what was still needing doing each day.

 

Now making final adjustments to the cabinet to meet the final lighting design needs. I have a 3+ week break over Christmas which... Given the state of things this year... Will be almost entirely spent on terminating switches and programming.

[Ferdinand]

Are we still critiquing this cabinet?

 

My only criticism is that of the colours of the rainbow, Violet is missing.

Which means that some poor child is in the future going to be tricked into believing that Richard Of York Gave Battle In Hotpants. And repeat it at school.

[Thorfun]

37 minutes ago, joth said:

Yup we're just onto tiling and mist coating this week.

I had our electrician pull most the cables, started off ok but they're a bit old school so pulling Cat6 cable one drop at a time became kinda rediculous with joist notching etc in the end they got the hang of identifying the main cabling "highways"" and pulling through a decent bundle of cable at once. I suggested daisy chaining a maximum of three switches/motion sensors per Tree drop, but left them to devise there own plan for the order of looping them which became rather crazy grouping things up by device type rather than room for unknown reasons, which massively increased the quantity of Cat6 used. 

I had a lot of other things on my plate during it all so was trying not to micro manage... In the end I had to anyway as they kinda lost the will to keep track of what was still needing doing each day.

 

Now making final adjustments to the cabinet to meet the final lighting design needs. I have a 3+ week break over Christmas which... Given the state of things this year... Will be almost entirely spent on terminating switches and programming.

awesome. glad it's all going well. are you using Tree cable then? and are you using the Loxone switches? just confused by the statement about the increase of quantity of Cat6. sorry if you've mentioned all this before, if you did I've probably read it and just forgot!

 

sounds like you're going to have a fun Christmas this year. good luck with it all.

[joth]

1 hour ago, Thorfun said:

awesome. glad it's all going well. are you using Tree cable then? and are you using the Loxone switches? just confused by the statement about the increase of quantity of Cat6. sorry if you've mentioned all this before, if you did I've probably read it and just forgot!

 

sounds like you're going to have a fun Christmas this year. good luck with it all.

Cheers!

 

I'm using Tree touch switches in important rooms and cheap retractive switches (and cheap 24v motion sensors) everywhere else

 

I'm using CAT6A for all this (in green ?) and for all the networking runs. This is 23AWG so plenty of power delivery and 8 cores makes it more useful than tree cable. The convention I settled on is each control run I've got power and Tree protocol on the orange and green pairs, and the blue pair can support 2 motion sensors and brown a pair of retractive switches. 

 

 

Edited November 29, 2020 by joth

[Thorfun]

15 minutes ago, joth said:

Cheers!

 

I'm using Tree touch switches in important rooms and cheap retractive switches (and cheap 24v motion sensors) everywhere else

 

I'm using CAT6A for all this (in green ?) and for all the networking runs. This is 23AWG so plenty of power delivery and 8 cores makes it more useful than tree cable. The convention I settled on is each control run I've got power and Tree protocol on the orange and green pairs, and the blue pair can support 2 motion sensors and brown a pair of retractive switches. 

 

 

so just a single CAT6A per switch? it's interesting that one cable will do the same job as the tree cable. I was thinking I might have to run 2 x CAT6A cables to each switch for comms and power. but a single cable is much easier!

 

I've been looking at the KNX switches. very sexy albeit a bit pricey! I've looked deeply in to the DMX route that you've taken but the reviews and posts I've read on the Loxone forum about the reliability of those DMX 302 dimmers has kind of put me off. I know the KNX extension is hugely expensive as are the dimmers when compared to DMX but the KNX dimmers are supposed to be very good and reliable and still cheaper than Loxone. but, I'm not 100% sure we need loads of dimming circuits anyway as the way I've planned the lighting in Dialux we have lots of mood lighting without the need for loads of dimmers. so it's tempting to just start with a few Loxone dimmers and then if we decide to add lots of dimming do it at a later date.

 

so many decisions to make and we haven't even broken ground yet!

 

I will keep following your progress with lots of interest. keep up the good work. ? 

[TonyT]

Hope there is some surge protection in the building with all that expensive gear!

love the panel, and can’t wait to see some pics energised, I’m a fan of this type of set up at work! , but not at home I’m afraid..

[joth]

1 hour ago, Thorfun said:

I've read on the Loxone forum about the reliability of those DMX 302 dimmers

Yeah the 302 seem quite terrible reliability and they dim the neutral rather than live which causes a lot of disgruntlement on that forum too.

For better or worse I'm using s1-dr. These seem a bit better, although the 1W vampire load per unit is not very nice and they have soldered on 5amp protection fuse so if you manage to make a snafu wiring it up there's a puff of smoke and the soldering iron has to come out to replace the fuse - not so cute.

If doing it again I'd probably have kept with plan A of using DALI everywhere, but used the Loxone DALI extension rather than mess around with KNX-DALI bridge.  Which would have kept the cabinet much simpler too. I gave up on that because I didn't want to use expensive "specification grade" DALI fixtures, but in the end I got a lighting designer's help and she spent a lot of my money on nice fixtures from Phos and Lucent Lighting that would only have been a fraction more to drive from DALI anyway.

Live and learn ... So now I know for next time....

 

 

1 hour ago, Thorfun said:

so just a single CAT6A per switch? 

I'm using 1 CAT6A per 2-3 switches. This allows a fairly free mix of Tree and retractive switch per cable run.

 

[Thorfun]

1 hour ago, joth said:

Yeah the 302 seem quite terrible reliability and they dim the neutral rather than live which causes a lot of disgruntlement on that forum too.

For better or worse I'm using s1-dr. These seem a bit better, although the 1W vampire load per unit is not very nice and they have soldered on 5amp protection fuse so if you manage to make a snafu wiring it up there's a puff of smoke and the soldering iron has to come out to replace the fuse - not so cute.

If doing it again I'd probably have kept with plan A of using DALI everywhere, but used the Loxone DALI extension rather than mess around with KNX-DALI bridge.  Which would have kept the cabinet much simpler too. I gave up on that because I didn't want to use expensive "specification grade" DALI fixtures, but in the end I got a lighting designer's help and she spent a lot of my money on nice fixtures from Phos and Lucent Lighting that would only have been a fraction more to drive from DALI anyway.

Live and learn ... So now I know for next time....

 

 

I'm using 1 CAT6A per 2-3 switches. This allows a fairly free mix of Tree and retractive switch per cable run.

 

thanks for sharing this experience. it's invaluable and I'll look in to Dali some more as I hadn't really checked that out yet. I have a lot of time before I have to make a final decision on all this.

[joth]

Part of my process was about convincing myself I wanted to go with loxone at all, or any automation system for that matter. So initially I was making low risk dabbling and then looking for the best value (cheapest) system I was comfortable with. 

But by the time we'd spent lockdown / my covid recovery building up the cabinet I felt I needed a lighting design that would do it justice and got cold feet about my own "grid of downlighters" which is where I got a professional designer involved at the 11th hour. She was truly amazing, put much into helping us and I learnt a lot.... But now I was really fully invested and the additional cost of DALI suddenly looks much less. So my real advice would be to get familiar with both and then get the lighting design nailed down (and even, all fixtures bought as lead times on some of it are terrible right now) and only then commit to exactly how many channels of which sort of dimming.

Aside from Dali Vs dmx, in the end a lot of the fancy lighting placement means I needed a lot more "remote drivers" than anticipated which actually means I could use centralised constant current drivers a lot more than I have. E.g. https://m.aliexpress.com/item/4001200401126.html

Edited November 30, 2020 by joth

[Thorfun]

1 hour ago, joth said:

Part of my process was about convincing myself I wanted to go with loxone at all, or any automation system for that matter. So initially I was making low risk dabbling and then looking for the best value (cheapest) system I was comfortable with. 

But by the time we'd spent lockdown / my covid recovery building up the cabinet I felt I needed a lighting design that would do it justice and got cold feet about my own "grid of downlighters" which is where I got a professional designer involved at the 11th hour. She was truly amazing, put much into helping us and I learnt a lot.... But now I was really fully invested and the additional cost of DALI suddenly looks much less. So my real advice would be to get familiar with both and then get the lighting design nailed down (and even, all fixtures bought as lead times on some of it are terrible right now) and only then commit to exactly how many channels of which sort of dimming.

Aside from Dali Vs dmx, in the end a lot of the fancy lighting placement means I needed a lot more "remote drivers" than anticipated which actually means I could use centralised constant current drivers a lot more than I have. E.g. https://m.aliexpress.com/item/4001200401126.html

 

this is great advice. thank you very much. once I get closer to making a decision on all this I'll most likely start my own post to get feedback from those, like yourself, that have done it.

 

I used Dialux Evo to design our lighting and we like it. I'm sure a professional lighting designer would laugh at it but I don't think we can afford one.

[Thorfun]

19 hours ago, joth said:

Yeah the 302 seem quite terrible reliability and they dim the neutral rather than live which causes a lot of disgruntlement on that forum too.

For better or worse I'm using s1-dr. These seem a bit better, although the 1W vampire load per unit is not very nice and they have soldered on 5amp protection fuse so if you manage to make a snafu wiring it up there's a puff of smoke and the soldering iron has to come out to replace the fuse - not so cute.

 

@joth did you see these DMX mains dimmers?

 

from https://groups.google.com/g/loxone-english/c/G1kb5HCZWSg/m/OHXiqlcDAQAJ

 

could mean that DMX is back on the table for me! ? 

[Dan F]

@Thorfun 

 

I've got @joth's unused DALI extension and have been playing with Loxone+DALI as well as tunable white functioanaltiy ?  Thoughts so far:

- As Joth said we've also seen that most mid-range light fittings than a designer would specify have a DALI driver option for small difference in price.

- DALI is easier to wire (230v + control line) than using centralized dimmers.

- Each fitting is a seperate DALI address so you run out of addresses very quickly.  This is an issue because the Loxone DALI extension only supports 48 addresses and costs £430.  One way you can get round this is if you have a group of 8 fittings they you know you are never going to want to operate indpeendant you can get a "DALI expander" device which will broadcast one DALI address to n light fittings.  (I'm yet to do the maths on how much you save though)

- Tunable white fittings are really interesting, but they are impossible to use with Loxone in any easy/practical way unless they come with a single DT8 driver.  The ones I've been loaned come with two DT6 drivers which means you use twice as many DALI addresses, and you have no way of controlling color temperature easily in Loxone because from Loxone's perspective they are two different fittings, one 2700k and one 5700K.

- Not looked into or decided what approach to take with RGBW stips yet. Could use loxone RGBW tree extensions, or could use DALI DT8 RGBW drivers.

 

 

 

Edited November 30, 2020 by Dan F

[Thorfun]

33 minutes ago, Dan F said:

@Thorfun 

 

I've got @joth's unused DALI extension and have been playing with Loxone+DALI as well as tunable white functioanaltiy ?  Thoughts so far:

- As Joth said we've also seen that most mid-range light fittings than a designer would specify have a DALI driver option for small difference in price.

- DALI is easier to wire (230v + control line) than using centralized dimmers.

- Each fitting is a seperate DALI address so you run out of addresses very quickly.  This is an issue because the Loxone DALI extension only supports 48 addresses and costs £430.  One way you can get round this is if you have a group of 8 fittings they you know you are never going to want to operate indpeendant you can get a "DALI expander" device which will broadcast one DALI address to n light fittings.  (I'm yet to do the maths on how much you save though)

- Tunable white fittings are really interesting, but they are impossible to use with Loxone in any easy/practical way unless they come with a single DT8 driver.  The ones I've been loaned come with two DT6 drivers which means you use twice as many DALI addresses, and you have no way of controlling color temperature easily in Loxone because from Loxone's perspective they are two different fittings, one 2700k and one 5700K.

- Not looked into or decided what approach to take with RGBW stips yet. Could use loxone RGBW tree extensions, or could use DALI DT8 RGBW drivers.

 

 

 

 

thanks @Dan F. very interesting post and thanks for sharing your thoughts. as previously mentioned I have a loooooong way to go before I have to make a decision on all this and I read every thread and post to do with the subject with great interest. 

 

I really look forward to reading your and @joth's experiences with your respective systems. as he's doing DMX and you're doing DALI maybe I should do KNX just to so we can tick all the boxes on this forum. ?

 

[joth]

9 hours ago, Thorfun said:

 

@joth did you see these DMX mains dimmers?

 

from https://groups.google.com/g/loxone-english/c/G1kb5HCZWSg/m/OHXiqlcDAQAJ

 

could mean that DMX is back on the table for me! ? 

I saw that email but the attachment didn't come through in digest mode, and I couldn't see it listed on the company's website so gave up looking. Now I see the pdf it looks really good, and good value. If I get reliability issues it'd be trivial to swap one of these in in place of 8 or the s1-dr dimmers I currently have (and would save on a fair bit of cabinet space and vampire load in the process)

 

[Thorfun]

5 hours ago, joth said:

and I couldn't see it listed on the company's website so gave up looking

Yeah, the original poster said he contacted them directly on the off chance. I guess they haven’t updated the website yet.