T
toasty
Chaps,
...this is quite a long post, so thanks to those who get to the bottom of it!
I'm moving house soon, and as the new place needs a rewire anyway, I thought I'd introduce a bit of home automation...
The more I've thought about it, the more and more things I find that I want to automate, my main concern is that once everything is wired and either under the floor or set in the walls I'll have no way of easily changing it, so I want to go for a really flexible system.
I'm pretty anti-X10 stuff as I've heard problems with interferance and in any case there seems little point in planning on going wireless when I've got the opportunity to run cabling wherever I want.
Most of the house will be ran via a number of pcs (servers) with parallel cards in which can drive 12v relays.
My plan is to wire every socket as a radial out from a central location (where I will have all the home automation stuff) With the exception of a few special sockets (fridge, freezer etc....) all the others will go back to a large metal enclosure containing banks of 20Amp relays (I'll be fusing the radials at 16 or 20amps and using 2.5mm T&E
Each socket will have it's own dedicated relay, which will be triggered from the parallel port cards on the pc (running some bespoke home automation software)
So that's the sockets sorted, anyone got any comments? Presumably using relays is fine provided they are adequately rated and in a locked/bolted cabinet?
The lights will be similar, except some will use DIN-Rail dimmers, the plan is to run 1mm T&E from the central location to all the light fittings (again a separate radial run for each light, and then cat 5 from the same central location to all the light switch locations. Initially the cat 5 will simply carry switching from the standard lightswitches to the relay panel, but as time goes on I'll be replacing some of the lighting relays with dimmers and concequenty replacing the standard light switches with controllers (hence the cat 5, 8 cores should be more than sufficient)
I'm fine with standard electrics, and electronics isn't a problem either, however really I'm unsure how the wiring regs deal with relays and such in a domestic installation, and is there anything it particular I should be aware of?
Thanks
-Dan
...this is quite a long post, so thanks to those who get to the bottom of it!
I'm moving house soon, and as the new place needs a rewire anyway, I thought I'd introduce a bit of home automation...
The more I've thought about it, the more and more things I find that I want to automate, my main concern is that once everything is wired and either under the floor or set in the walls I'll have no way of easily changing it, so I want to go for a really flexible system.
I'm pretty anti-X10 stuff as I've heard problems with interferance and in any case there seems little point in planning on going wireless when I've got the opportunity to run cabling wherever I want.
Most of the house will be ran via a number of pcs (servers) with parallel cards in which can drive 12v relays.
My plan is to wire every socket as a radial out from a central location (where I will have all the home automation stuff) With the exception of a few special sockets (fridge, freezer etc....) all the others will go back to a large metal enclosure containing banks of 20Amp relays (I'll be fusing the radials at 16 or 20amps and using 2.5mm T&E
Each socket will have it's own dedicated relay, which will be triggered from the parallel port cards on the pc (running some bespoke home automation software)
So that's the sockets sorted, anyone got any comments? Presumably using relays is fine provided they are adequately rated and in a locked/bolted cabinet?
The lights will be similar, except some will use DIN-Rail dimmers, the plan is to run 1mm T&E from the central location to all the light fittings (again a separate radial run for each light, and then cat 5 from the same central location to all the light switch locations. Initially the cat 5 will simply carry switching from the standard lightswitches to the relay panel, but as time goes on I'll be replacing some of the lighting relays with dimmers and concequenty replacing the standard light switches with controllers (hence the cat 5, 8 cores should be more than sufficient)
I'm fine with standard electrics, and electronics isn't a problem either, however really I'm unsure how the wiring regs deal with relays and such in a domestic installation, and is there anything it particular I should be aware of?
Thanks
-Dan