Home Lighting Control System

[JohnnyP]

Hi, I’m an Electrician building my own home.

Any of the lighting control systems seem to be huge money.

I’m going to pick a system that I can add to overtime rather than splashing out all at once. The control units all seem to be around 8 outputs. So I’m thinking two of those for now. The electronic light switches seems to be what adds up the money.
Could anyone recommend a good all round system please. That’s easy enough to install/program and use and affordable.

 

[AJshep]

What's your budget?

 

[JohnnyP]

What's your budget?

Hi Aj

Around 2-3k starting off if possible.

Where I’m caught at the moment is figuring out what cable to run for the switches.
I’ve got a lighting control panel in my attic and all the cables ran out to the lights are ran back there.
Just need supply’s from the main board and to my switches.

 

[ForkEnigma]

Things are changing rapidly within the smart lighting industry. I can see DALI being a thing of the past. What used to be bane for me, is now considered the norm. That is to have neutrals at switches. You can get smart WiFi switches where you can install them where your switches are.
Or you cable in a cat6 cable to all your lighting points.
Hard wiring is still winning for me.
You can get stand alone home Dali systems. Your dimming options will be much better as well.

 

[JohnnyP]

Things are changing rapidly within the smart lighting industry. I can see DALI being a thing of the past. What used to be bane for me, is now considered the norm. That is to have neutrals at switches. You can get smart WiFi switches where you can install them where your switches are.
Or you cable in a cat6 cable to all your lighting points.
Hard wiring is still winning for me.
You can get stand alone home Dali systems. Your dimming options will be much better as well.

Agree totally. I’m not into the whole wireless thing, especially not in a new build changing out batteries every couple of years makes no sense to me. I’ve since been in touch with a guy that does Legrand My-Home smart BUS system. It’s a matter of just looping out all the light switches in 2 core Legrand cable. It’s meant to be affordable and you can add to it as you go. You program it through the My-Home app.

 

[AJshep]

The system I use is Loxone, but it depends on how much you want to spend time wise and how big your house is.
Their own topology is called a tree system..
It works of 4 cores on a Cat 7, two being the 24v+/- and another two being their tree bus system...
However you could just wire each switch into a digital input and use standard retractive switches to keep costs down but obviously that means more routes back to your central location.

 

[299Lighting]

CASAMBI offer a great wireless solution for residential use. Works on bluetooth from a phone/tablet or bluetooth switch. It requires DALI dimmable luminaires - the CASAMBI module sits on the DALI input of the luminaire.

No battery replacements - you can even get switches that work on the kinetic energy created by the button push!

 

[299Lighting]

CASAMBI offer a great wireless solution for residential use. Works on bluetooth from a phone/tablet or bluetooth switch. It requires DALI dimmable luminaires - the CASAMBI module sits on the DALI input of the luminaire.

No battery replacements - you can even get switches that work on the kinetic energy created by the button push!

Also no centralised architecture - there is no lighting control panel or DALI gateways etc. everything is within the luminaire modules.

 

[Simon47]

I've been "sort of" looking at this on and off to see what's out there, partly because we need to upgrade the lighting at church, partly because I fancy something different at home.
The big issue as I see it is not getting locked into some proprietary system - and DALI ticks that box. BTW AIUI DALI does not need a central control unit - though you can have one if you want. Unlike DMX (which is the faster system commonly used in theatrical type setups), DALI can have multiple controllers on a bus - so for example, you can have a DALI module at a light switch, and program it to send on-off messages direct to a specific bus address so it works the light in that room. Even two (or more) way switching shoudl be easy to do with stand alone controllers - pressing "on" on any of them will signal the light to turn on, pressing "off" on any of them would signal it to turn off.
You can also have a centralised system that will (for example) turn lights on/off at different times during the evening to make the house look a little occupied - and if it controls the same light as the switch, then the light will follow the last instruction it receives.
Gets a bit more complicated if you want (e.g.) security lighting with PIRs and stuff, as then you might need a centralised controller to manage inputs from the PIR and manual switches. You wouldn't want to switch the light one with the switch, only for the PIR to turn it off as normal a few minute after you've walked past it.

As for wired vs wireless - give me wired any day. Wireless has all sorts of interesting failure modes, depending on how things are set up. If you don't connect them to one network then it's going to be an interesting setup to manage; if you do then you make things dependent on that network (when your internet router goes down, all your lights stop working, sort of stuff). And if your wireless kit isn't "robust" in it's protocols (in particular getting acknowledgement of each transmission) then it won't take much interference (including other band users) to cause lost messages.
The one downside of (e.g.) a DALI bus is that one faulty device could block the whole bus - but then one faulty device in a traditional setup can "block" a whole circuit by tripping/preventing reset of the MCB or RCD.