DIN Rail

[Big Neil]

Evening all.

 

The components in a consumer unit are din rail mounted i believe, loxone kit at the very least when talking about home automation kit is. I've found an amp by 'legrande(??)' which is also mountable on DIn rail. So my thought ws this. Assuming one can also find a patch panel and ethernet switch which also are, is there anything to stop all these components from being mounted in a single cabinet. You know, for the sake of tidiness and the like?

[Jeremy Harris]

You can mount stuff in a single cabinet, as long as it has adequate provision for separating the audio/data/SELV/ELV stuff (control signals, audio, etc) from the LV stuff (mains switchgear etc).  This isn't that hard, as there are cabinets available that allow this fairly easily.  IIRC, @jack has a single large cabinet that's divided, with the Loxone audio/data/SELV/ELV cables separated from the LV cables by internal trunking.

[Big Neil]

Good answer - thanks. so then @jack. Are there pictures of your install about? Which cabinet did you use?

[jack]

Hi @Big Neil

 

No photos at the moment, but I used a rack from here: https://www.futureautomation.co.uk/Product/Details/LXN

 

They're designed for use with Loxone. Not cheap, but pretty well built.

 

It does get crowded very quickly if you wire the way Loxone suggests. You can imagine having to bring in a CAT 6 cable for every single input and output, when you're usually only using one pair from each cable (eg, you wire to a light switch, using one pair, but you bring the whole cable back to the cabinet).

 

I don't know how people manage to keep things neat without spending a lot of money and time on termination hardware.

[Adam2]

Would an amp be more sensitive to interference being in a metal box with other electronics? 

 

May find the IT cabinet suppliers may give competitive prices - especially if it's not on display so you're not fussy on looks. I'm planning on a cabinet with a patch panel, power supply and shelves for non-rack mounted kit. Not sure how well lighting controllers will go in there or if may be better suited to a less-deep DIN rail mounted elsewhere...

[joth]

A cheaper option might be something like Hager – 3250616411265 for the Loxone and SELV kit along side a conventional CU box. (That hager box is not IET regs compliant so can't house the RCD etc).

 

I'm sort of planning this approach. In fact, I've already ordered that cabinet just to house my "test rig" that I'm experimenting with prior to starting any works.

 

Regarding audio gear -- I'm steering completely away from the Loxone solution. It's very expensive for what amounts to a bog-standard PC running a slightly tweaked version of the old Squeezebox media server (which was Opensource software so pretty ripe them charging so much for their closed-source encasement of if) (and it's really long in the tooth -- my 13 yr old SlimDevices squeezebox was retired several years ago now).

The real decider was when I looked on the back of their media server and it's just a bunch of analogue 3.5mm stereo jacks on consumer grade sound cards (inc. the motherboard's built in one). They expect you to run analogue cable from it to all the amps and speaker cable from there to every room. That's literally how I did it in my student digs prior to buying that aforementioned squeezebox device,  decades ago. 

But if I was using any of that, I wouldn't want it anywhere near the mains distro area.

 

AFAICT the only nice selling point (if you like that sort of thing) of their media solution is it is easy to  have spoken announcements through it when other events happen in the house. (Alarm set, phone ringing, "time for tea", etc etc).  I question if that feature is worth that much lock-in: in fact the marque of a good home-automation system should be how well it integrates with best-in-breed of other maker's gear for a given function.

 

[Disclaimer: I was given a Loxone miniserver by a colleague who was going to use it, but then decided to go all-in with Gira KNX system. I'm searching for excuses to do the same, despite the major budget hit!]