(Loxone || Home Assistant) && (Traditional Wiring)? (And other random Qs)

[SBMS]

OK, so just getting to lid on, on our second build.  Have started thinking about home automation and am realising what a minefield it is!  Am hoping the community can help me out here.  As some background - am a software engineer by trade (don’t do much coding anymore) but have build software etc so reasonably proficient with technology.  I am not, however, electrically gifted from a wiring point of view, so this is where I am coming unstuck at points.

 

I have read a lot of @Thorfun’s mega Loxone thread and started to get a bit lost. I’ve also trawled the hub reading @Pocster’s encounters with Home Assistant.

 

The background - I would like to have the house pretty well automated. So Reolink local camera system, lighting, audio, blinds, irrigation system, door locks etc.

 

I’ve narrowed it down to Loxone and Home Assistant as the two options.  I’d rather not run both (although I think @joth from some of your comments, you do?).   I think there’s a higher cost for Loxone, but it has some neat features, the wall switches look lovely, and its ecosystem looks really well integrated.  On the other hand, Home Assistant looks infinitely flexible with more support for a wider area of devices.  

 

First question - anyone have any recommendations of which route to go down?

 

Second question - can the ecosystem question be deferred to second fix? i.e. wire in a ecosystem agnostic way back to the plant room and then decide to either stick Loxone relays, or Shelly relays later?  Or.. even better… if I went in on Loxone, but then decided in 5 years that it wasn’t right, I could flip it out without ripping any cabling out?

 

Third question - is it possible and/or advisable to wire lighting conventionally as well (i.e. cable for a lighting circuit back to a switch in the wall, and back to plant room) in the event that I wanted to revert back to conventional light switches etc? Is this a waste of time and money?

 

And, fourth question - this is probably a bit of a wiring-lighting specific one, but hopefully will help give me some clarity of exactly how it’s supposed to work…. This is going to show my naivety in electrical wiring but I think once I get it everything else will click into place…. Say that I have 10 downlighters that are a single ‘zone’ in a ceiling. I assume that they wouldn’t be individually addressable (overkill?), but would be formed in a single ring.  If using something like Home Assistant, they’d be wired back to the plant room and connected to a Shelly relay (or they could be connected locally in the room I guess, but same principle).  In a Loxone setup how does this work?  I don’t really understand the principle of powering 24v devices from the Loxone unit - would this circuit come back to a Loxone relay in the plant room?  Do the lights still need independently powering at the light itself, or are they be powered from the Loxone relay itself?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Thorfun]

Damn! That’s a lot of questions. Although pales in to comparison to the number of questions I asked on the subject. 🤣

 

1. Loxone all the way for me. I wanted a system that was easy to manage/maintain if I wasn’t around. 
 

2. I think so. At least I hope so! I think as long as you don’t use tree cable then you could change ecosystem. I ran 1.5mm T&E to every fitting and Cat6A to every switch and PIR location. You can run multiple tree devices off a single cable but I configured each room so I had one Cat6A cable for 2 x tree devices generally. More cable but gave flexibility if I didn’t want to use tree devices.

 

3. I asked the same question and was told it was a waste of time and cable. 
 

4. in Loxone if you went for their 24V downlights then each on is individually addressable and controllable if you want. I’ve done that in our music room and set each one to be a different colour for one setting which was pretty cool. 
but you can just do the same as for home assistant and control 230V fittings wired in a string using either Loxone relays or 3rd party controllers. I like the Whitewing stuff but others have bought cheaper controllers from Aliexpress. But I chose to support a small UK company in the end. 
Also Loxone gives you the option to run different controllers, e.g DMX, KNX, Dali etc. so it can basically do whatever you want!

 

It’s definitely a bit on a minefield when you start thinking about it all and it took me a while to get my head around it all. Take your time and all will become clear in the end. 

[SBMS]

3 minutes ago, Thorfun said:

Damn! That’s a lot of questions. Although pales in to comparison to the number of questions I asked on the subject. 🤣

 

1. Loxone all the way for me. I wanted a system that was easy to manage/maintain if I wasn’t around. 
 

2. I think so. At least I hope so! I think as long as you don’t use tree cable then you could change ecosystem. I ran 1.5mm T&E to every fitting and Cat6A to every switch and PIR location. You can run multiple tree devices off a single cable but I configured each room so I had one Cat6A cable for 2 x tree devices generally. More cable but gave flexibility if I didn’t want to use tree devices.

 

3. I asked the same question and was told it was a waste of time and cable. 
 

4. in Loxone if you went for their 24V downlights then each on is individually addressable and controllable if you want. I’ve done that in our music room and set each one to be a different colour for one setting which was pretty cool. 
but you can just do the same as for home assistant and control 230V fittings wired in a string using either Loxone relays or 3rd party controllers. I like the Whitewing stuff but others have bought cheaper controllers from Aliexpress. But I chose to support a small UK company in the end. 
Also Loxone gives you the option to run different controllers, e.g DMX, KNX, Dali etc. so it can basically do whatever you want!

 

It’s definitely a bit on a minefield when you start thinking about it all and it took me a while to get my head around it all. Take your time and all will become clear in the end. 

Thanks @Thorfun. I saw some discussion on your mega-thread around the Whitewing box.. Can you summarise exactly what it is and how you used it?

 

With your lighting did you go for 230V light fittings powered separately, and then add drivers to lights, or power centrally?

[Thorfun]

4 minutes ago, SBMS said:

Thanks @Thorfun. I saw some discussion on your mega-thread around the Whitewing box.. Can you summarise exactly what it is and how you used it?

 

With your lighting did you go for 230V light fittings powered separately, and then add drivers to lights, or power centrally?

The Whitewing stuff is basically DMX controlled relays/dimmers. I have mains and 24V units but also some Loxone relays although Mike from Whitewing is now offering mains relays and I’d probably use those if I was doing it again as they work out substantially cheaper iirc. 
 

so I have a mix of mains lighting and 24V leds/strips but it’s all wired back and controlled centrally from the Loxone cabinet. You have to consider the voltage drop for 24V lighting when doing it this way and size the cable accordingly. 
 

when you start to get a hang of this all go through my thread again as there is some great information on there but I understand it’s a lot to go through and digest when you’re first starting out!

[MikeSharp01]

1 hour ago, SBMS said:

Third question - is it possible and/or advisable to wire lighting conventionally as well (i.e. cable for a lighting circuit back to a switch in the wall, and back to plant room) in the event that I wanted to revert back to conventional light switches etc? Is this a waste of time and money?

Not needed because if you, or some later occupier, wants to go back to traditional wiring they can do it at the panel because all the wires are there. So I would probably suggest, as it what we have done, only one tweak and that would be to make sure you have enough ways (wires) to/from each switch to allow conventional wiring so if the switch would, in a conventional scheme, be a cross over then you need 4 ways plus earth or a change over then 3 ways and earth.

 

[Kelvin]

You really don’t need to have individually addressable downlights. It might be something you’ll think you’ll use a lot but it’s likely you won’t in reality. We have 16 downlights in the open plan kitchen/dining area plus three pendant lights over the island, one over the dining table and an LED in the long alcove/shelf on the back wall of the kitchen. The 16 downlights are wired as 4 separate groups of 4 and the others are also on their own circuits. This allows us to have a few different ‘moods’ (as Loxone calls it) so for example when the house is in night mode after we’ve gone to bed if you get up and go downstairs only the strip by the island lights up and it’s dimmed, if I’m cooking the two strips above the island can be illuminated at full brightness etc.

 

We have track lighting in our TV room and this is where more individually addressable Loxone lighting would have been more useful. To achieve the same result I re-used several of the Philips Hue GU10 bulbs I already had. It works well with Loxone as we have 4 tracks of lights on separate circuits, and Hue bulbs in the track above the seating position and where my desk is. I’ve set the bulbs to the colour I want above the sofa (very dimmed blue cinema styli) and daylight colour temperature above my desk. I then created a mood in Loxone for cinema and office. I never need to use the Philips Hue app and just use Loxone to control it. Same with the outside lights which are also all Hue GU10 bulbs (16 of them again because I already had them) They are the coloured type but only ever have them at warm white. I find you don’t change the lighting moods/scenes as much as you think you will once you’ve settled on the way you want everything. 
 

The Loxone stuff is good and easy to configure once you become familiar with Loxone Config. I especially like the Touch Pure glass fronted switches and we have these in the main living areas and the less expensive somewhat cheap looking Touch switches everywhere else. Overall it is relatively expensive though.
 

Also while you can integrate some third party devices and services with Loxone it is much more limited than say Home Assistant where you can easily update devices as new products become available. Loxone also seem to be slow in developing new products. I chose not extend Loxone into the garage and decided to use what I already had managed by SmartThings but really only because I had a large box of sensors, fire alarms, smoke detectors, lighting relays, leak detectors etc I have sort of connected Loxone and this together using Matter. I will eventually move that over to Home Assistant. 
 

 

[SBMS]

14 minutes ago, Kelvin said:

The 16 downlights are wired as 4 separate groups of 4 and the others are also on their own circuits

Thanks @Kelvin. Did you bring these back to your Loxone cab and then use 4x relay outputs from the mini server/extension? If that is the case - and get ready for a massive knowledge gap here in circuitry - how does that circuit receive power? So assuming there’s a T&E cable string coming back to your cabinet, how does that get wired (a) into the relay and (b) into mains power?

[SBMS]

30 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

only one tweak and that would be to make sure you have enough ways (wires) to/from each switch to allow conventional wiring so if the switch would, in a conventional scheme, be a cross over then you need 4 ways plus earth or a change over then 3 ways and earth.

I assume that if you ever needed to revert to standard switches, you put a standard switch in the wall and then make the connection between that switch and the lighting circuit in your central cabinet then (rather than at the switch itself?)

 

Are these wires provided by CAT6, or are you running additional T&E from each switch back to the central cabinet and then using some of those wires for your Tree connections into the switches? Don’t suppose you have an example diagram to illustrate how to support both the Loxone switch and a potential reversion to a traditional setup if done later?

[Kelvin]

9 minutes ago, SBMS said:

Thanks @Kelvin. Did you bring these back to your Loxone cab and then use 4x relay outputs from the mini server/extension? If that is the case - and get ready for a massive knowledge gap here in circuitry - how does that circuit receive power? So assuming there’s a T&E cable string coming back to your cabinet, how does that get wired (a) into the relay and (b) into mains power?

 

Like this. The lighting circuits come back to the panel and are connected to the either relay extensions or dimmer extensions. Power comes from your CU into the panel protection and whichever PSU you decide to use. I used the rather expensive Loxone PSU there are cheaper more flexible ways to do that. 
 

[SBMS]

1 hour ago, Thorfun said:

Mike from Whitewing is now offering mains relays

How would the loxone be able to control the white wing mains relays? Is this via the dmx extension (ie does the mains relay present the channels to the loxone via dmx)?

[SBMS]

1 minute ago, Kelvin said:

 

Like this. The lighting circuits come back to the panel and are connected to the either relay extensions or dimmer extensions. Power comes from your CU into the panel protection and whichever PSU you decide to use. I used the rather expensive Loxone PSU there are cheaper more flexible ways to do that. 
 

So does power go into the loxone PSU then into the relay? So when the relay is activated it is providing power to the lighting circuit (rather than simply closing a switch)?

[Kelvin]

3 minutes ago, SBMS said:

So does power go into the loxone PSU then into the relay? So when the relay is activated it is providing power to the lighting circuit (rather than simply closing a switch)?

The Loxone PSU is powering all the 24V Loxone devices. The lighting circuits are 230V. 

[SBMS]

6 minutes ago, Kelvin said:

The Loxone PSU is powering all the 24V Loxone devices. The lighting circuits are 230V. 

Think I’ve got it. So each relay out output has 230v live fed from the CU and then the live from The lighting circuit is fed into second relay contact? 

[Kelvin]

Yes pretty much. In my case I’m using the dimmer extensions for a few of the rooms where dimming makes sense and relay extensions for everything else. Mains dimming has its limitations but I only need three settings: full bright, dimmed (about 60%) for more ambience, and night (about 30%) 

[SBMS]

9 minutes ago, Kelvin said:

Yes pretty much. In my case I’m using the dimmer extensions for a few of the rooms where dimming makes sense and relay extensions for everything else. Mains dimming has its limitations but I only need three settings: full bright, dimmed (about 60%) for more ambience, and night (about 30%) 

Did you consider a third party relay/dimmer such as whitewing? Or did you want to stay loxone native?

[Kelvin]

I wanted it to be as straightforward as possible  and I knew nothing about any of it at the time so this was an easy decision to make. Like you, I read all the threads on here and elsewhere and it was somewhat confusing. 

[Thorfun]

1 hour ago, SBMS said:

How would the loxone be able to control the white wing mains relays? Is this via the dmx extension (ie does the mains relay present the channels to the loxone via dmx)?

Yep! Exactly this. 

[Pocster]

Sounds like you’re going with lox . That’s fine of course . As an ex software engineer myself you should be a tinker ! - bit of wiring nah no worries . Home assistant gives lots of diversity and at a diy cost . All your requirements I’ve done . So I look for the next thing to play with .

Though for lighting a zigbee relay ( dimmable , wrgb etc etc ) is pretty reliable at a fraction of the cost . But that’s it I guess , if you ain’t a tinker probably the wrong route to go .

Edited Sunday at 12:30 by Pocster

[SBMS]

7 minutes ago, Pocster said:

Sounds like you’re going with lox . That’s fine of course . As an ex software engineer myself you should be a tinker ! - bit of wiring nah no worries . Home assistant gives lots of diversity and at a diy cost . All your requirements I’ve done . So I look for the next thing to play with .

Though for lighting a zigbee relay ( dimmable , wrgb etc etc ) is pretty reliable at a fraction of the cost . But that’s it I guess , if you ain’t a tinker probably the wrong route to go .

I am a tinkerer but I also have two very young kids so my time Is severely limited..! Ive

got loads of stuff to sort tbh but I do think I can try and first fix in such a way as to leave options open.. Luxone’s visual designer does look pretty good and I think there’s plenty of scope for tinkering. I do hear you though… I wanted - for example - to link motion on the external reolink cameras to a floodlight via luxone which I don’t think is possible. 

[Pocster]

1 minute ago, SBMS said:

I am a tinkerer but I also have two very young kids so my time Is severely limited..! Ive

got loads of stuff to sort tbh but I do think I can try and first fix in such a way as to leave options open.. Luxone’s visual designer does look pretty good and I think there’s plenty of scope for tinkering. I do hear you though… I wanted - for example - to link motion on the external reolink cameras to a floodlight via luxone which I don’t think is possible. 

That’s the thing with home assistant . You can pretty much get it to do anything you want without being tied into an eco system . But if time is tight and money is free flowing then your choice is wise young Jedi 

[Kelvin]

8 minutes ago, SBMS said:

I am a tinkerer but I also have two very young kids so my time Is severely limited..! Ive

got loads of stuff to sort tbh but I do think I can try and first fix in such a way as to leave options open.. Luxone’s visual designer does look pretty good and I think there’s plenty of scope for tinkering. I do hear you though… I wanted - for example - to link motion on the external reolink cameras to a floodlight via luxone which I don’t think is possible. 

This is exactly the advantage with Home Assistant as there’s very little you can’t do. They said my Reolink cameras have built in lights that are actually quite powerful so I haven’t bothered with a floodlight. They also have floodlight cameras if that was a requirement. 

[SBMS]

1 minute ago, Kelvin said:

This is exactly the advantage with Home Assistant as there’s very little you can’t do. They said my Reolink cameras have built in lights that are actually quite powerful so I haven’t bothered with a floodlight. They also have floodlight cameras if that was a requirement. 

One of the really attractive options with Loxone is its intercom and NFC touch controls.  I set aside a budget for automation at our gates, and Loxone would be able to provide the intercom/NFC for this.. The OCD in me wanted to keep everything inside one place, but that might not be possible.  If I went loxone, was planning on mounting an iPad on the wall as a home hub - @Kelvin, @Thorfun - do you know if this works well? @Pocster, is there something similar for Home Assistant?

[Pocster]

6 minutes ago, SBMS said:

One of the really attractive options with Loxone is its intercom and NFC touch controls.  I set aside a budget for automation at our gates, and Loxone would be able to provide the intercom/NFC for this.. The OCD in me wanted to keep everything inside one place, but that might not be possible.  If I went loxone, was planning on mounting an iPad on the wall as a home hub - @Kelvin, @Thorfun - do you know if this works well? @Pocster, is there something similar for Home Assistant?

Yes . You can make any tablet a ‘console ‘ . So you could have selective icons / controls just for intercom etc .

[Kelvin]

Yes you can use an iPad as main console, it’s what we do or set it up as managed tablet although that probably makes more sense in an office environment. We have an iPad on the kitchen counter. The reality is though that once setup you rarely need to look at the Loxone App. 
 

The Loxone intercom is stupidly expensive and its IP protection is 34 so I wasn’t convinced it could survive wind driven rain. 

Edited Sunday at 13:23 by Kelvin

[SBMS]

6 minutes ago, Kelvin said:

Yes you can use an iPad as main console, it’s what we do or set it up as managed tablet although that probably makes more sense in an office environment. We have an iPad on the kitchen counter. The reality is though that once setup you rarely need to look at the Loxone App. 
 

The Loxone intercom is stupidly expensive and its IP protection is 34 so I wasn’t convinced it could survive wind driven rain. 

Is that the updated Intercom or the old style 80s silver one? What did you use instead?