Critique my home automation cabinet wiring

[joth]

Exciting step forward today - LXN5 panel is on the wall. I start my Christmas "holidays" tomorrow, may the extensive termination festivities begin!!

 

 

[Thorfun]

@joth I see from the Loxone group that you picked up a couple of those WhiteWing DMX dimmers. I look forward to reading your thoughts on them.

[Dan F]

On 10/12/2020 at 13:37, joth said:

LXN5 panel is on the wall.

 

Any idea if there are any requirements regarding how high the panel has to be off the floor (particuarly when there is mains/RCBO's on the bottom rail) for building regs?  Or does @Rob99 know?

 

While we still plan to use DALI, if I use central RGBW extensions for lots of LED strips and central relays for blinds/UFH too then the cabinet fills up very quickly.  While everything would probably just about fit in a LXN5 cabinet there would be no room for expansion, let alone to give an audioserver a go.

 

Looks like either need to:

- Potentially get a larger cabinet

- Use two cabinets; one for lighting/relays and another one for low-voltage and audio.

- Move to the more distbributed approach I considered initially. 
     i) Use nano tree relays around the house for blind control.
     ii) use RGBW tree compact or DALI RGBW drivers around the house.

 

[TonyT]

Look up part M of the building regs

 

i emailed my building control dept  as I wanted the switches in my extension to be the same as the old part of the house.

different heights from non compliant to compliant - they were quite relaxed about it, so may be worth an email 

[Rob99]

There are regs on height of consumer unit MCBs/RCBOs which from memory I think is 1350-1450 from floor level. Providing your control cabinet is fed from RCBO's in the consumer unit then local RCBOs in your cabinet can be at any height.

[joth]

Yeah as you can see in the photo above our new consumer unit is smack bang up against the ceiling. Renovation so that's ok. Originally I wanted to put all the rcbos in the loxone panel (hence why I shelled out for the 18th ed compliant LXN panel) but our contractor's electrician preferred to keep the rest of the electrics out of it and as I'm DIYing the loxone install I was fine keeping life easy as I can for him on the rest of the job.

 

Should have another update soon, been a busy few days swapping in the final dimmer configuration based on final lighting design

 

 

Edited December 16, 2020 by joth

[joth]

Milestone reached today: all the Mains dimming circuits are terminated to the panel. 

Slight frustration of the Weidmuller terminal blocks is the Live core is hidden under the neutral wire, so if you have a few circuits not yet terminated at the fixture end it's tricky to make them safe on the panel. In theory the spring clips should make it easy to disconnect unused cores. 

The WhiteWorks dimmers are very nice. The built in test modes very handy indeed. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rob99]

Looking good Joth

??

[joth]

Couple more hours and I've got most of the low voltage runs terminated - top left corner. This is 24V LED strips, constant current fixtures and all the light switches and motion sensors.

 

As I have used U/FTP CAT6A I have a lot of spare cores on each sensor run (max 3 devices per run). I also have to earth the shielding. For now I just bundled up all the spare cores and the drain wire and wrapped some copper earthing around it. Not very pretty but it does the job. Interested how others manage this (if you've used screened CAT cable). Pictures invited!

 

 

[Gav_P]

That’s amazing! Haven’t got a clue what’s going on there but I feel I want one! ?

[ProDave]

That's very neat, I would have been happy for that as the control cabinet for a small machine.

 

Just make sure you document it all or the next owner will not be speaking highly of you.

[Mr Punter]

What stuff have you automated and how do you operate it?

 

Does the rest of the house look like somewhere a Bond villain could live?

[joth]

2 hours ago, Mr Punter said:

What stuff have you automated and how do you operate it?

 

 

 

If done well the whole point of automation is you don't need to operate it. It automatically operates itself, thus automation. 

E.g. turning on the bathtub hot water tap can automatically turn up the ventilation, get the towel heater warming, set the lighting to bathing mode and cue up some soothing tunes. 

I have all the sensors and connections in place to implement this, so now making it happen is just a matter of software.

 

Once settled in the idea is resorting to a touch screen or voice assistant is a last resort (mostly just used for browsing/choosing media)

 

 

 

[Pocster]

18 minutes ago, joth said:

 

If done well the whole point of automation is you don't need to operate it. It automatically operates itself, thus automation. 

E.g. turning on the bathtub hot water tap can automatically turn up the ventilation, get the towel heater warming, set the lighting to bathing mode and cue up some soothing tunes. 

I have all the sensors and connections in place to implement this, so now making it happen is just a matter of software.

 

Once settled in the idea is resorting to a touch screen or voice assistant is a last resort (mostly just used for browsing/choosing media)

 

 

 

Exactly my logic . Whilst you can control things from a screen or Alexa in reality you just want these things to happen automatically. Really should give everyone in the house a rfid - probably wait until facial recognition is available- though that means a camera definitely in the bathroom ...... ??

[jack]

1 hour ago, joth said:

If done well the whole point of automation is you don't need to operate it. It automatically operates itself, thus automation. 

E.g. turning on the bathtub hot water tap can automatically turn up the ventilation, get the towel heater warming, set the lighting to bathing mode and cue up some soothing tunes. 

I have all the sensors and connections in place to implement this, so now making it happen is just a matter of software.

 

Once settled in the idea is resorting to a touch screen or voice assistant is a last resort (mostly just used for browsing/choosing media)

 

Exactly this. Whenever I tell people I have a home automation system installed, they immediately assume I get my phone out every time I want to do anything. Absolutely not - that would be a massive pain. 

 

The only time the app comes out at the moment is when the family sits down to watch the TV and I want to turn the living room lights to "TV watching mode" and turn off all the other lights in the house. That's done via a single button on the app. And the only reason that's still app-only is that I haven't bothered wiring up one of the switches in the living room so that something like a long press achieves the same result.

 

I haven't done much in the way of actual automation. It's more things like:

 - an "all upstairs lights off" switch at the bottom of the stairs

 - an "all downstairs lights off" switch in the middle of the landing upstairs

 - an "all lights off" function: when you double-click either of our bedside light switches, it turns off all lights in the house. Single-clicking the same switch just toggles the adjacent bedside light.

 

The latter is my favourite function by far. I expect it to eventually also do things like closing the front gates (once we've installed them), checking the garage door is closed, changing the function of the external movement detectors, etc.

 

19 hours ago, joth said:

As I have used U/FTP CAT6A I have a lot of spare cores on each sensor run (max 3 devices per run). I also have to earth the shielding. For now I just bundled up all the spare cores and the drain wire and wrapped some copper earthing around it. Not very pretty but it does the job. Interested how others manage this (if you've used screened CAT cable). Pictures invited!

 

I don't have any pics of my Loxone install and it's a bit of a faff getting the cover off to take them. However, we had the same issue - three spare pairs for almost every CAT6 run, and LOTS of CAT6 cables, all coming into the same place. In the end, we stripped off the outer insulation (we didn't use screened) and ran only those cores that would be used into the cabinet. To allow us to run the data pairs without the outer insulation, we were ultra-cautious to completely physically separate mains power from the data pairs. In cases where this wasn't possible, we sleeved the data pairs.  

 

We carefully rolled up all the spare cores and housed them (carefully labelled!) in a plastic box that abuts the cabinet. It can take a while to find a particular core if you want to add it to the system, but once you do so, it's a relatively easy matter to thread it through to the relevant Loxone input.

 

It looks like you're using the Tree system. It certainly makes for a neater install - we have several times the number of CAT6 cables arriving at the cabinet compared to your setup.

[Dan F]

7 hours ago, joth said:

turning on the bathtub hot water tap can automatically turn up the ventilation,

Temp sensor on hot water pipe to bath?

[Mr Punter]

A friend of mine who does access control is red/green colour blind.  I bet he would struggle to wire joth's cabinet.

 

I find phone apps a real PITA.  I have SONOS and by the time the app wakes up, wants updating, tries to scam me into new hardware etc I have raged and fallen asleep.

 

I like the idea of home automation but it does seem to be a lot to do with lighting, which I have never found an issue.  The cabinet is proper porn though.

[Gav_P]

8 hours ago, Mr Punter said:

I have SONOS and by the time the app wakes up, wants updating, tries to scam me into new hardware etc I have raged and fallen asleep.

Ditto... great sound quality but crap OS. We sold ours. Currently just using Alexa echo dots, not great sound quality but easy to get music on round the house.

[Onoff]

I assume you are bequeathing all this to a non favoured child or somebody you don't like? ?

[Triassic]

11 hours ago, Dan F said:

Temp sensor on hot water pipe to bath?

Does Home Assistant have an option to do that?

[joth]

6 minutes ago, Triassic said:

11 hours ago, Dan F said:

Temp sensor on hot water pipe to bath?

Does Home Assistant have an option to do that

 

Yes, I've taped DS18B20 thermistors inside the insulation on the feeds to each shower/bath hot tap. These could connect to loxone via a 1-wire extension but I'm pretty happy using EspHome with home assistant and a small ESP D1 mini board to read them. 

My goal is all mandatory functions (lighting, heating) will work in loxone server autonomously and any fancy optional automations will be driven from home assistant. So if anything is flaky unreliable or I'm not about to be admin or we sell the house, the home assistant stuff can just be turned off/removed and the core functions all continue fine in loxone on its own. 

Edited December 30, 2020 by joth