Lights Automation (Z-wave, Insteon, Fibaro, openHab)

Victorian House

Hi all,

I came across an interesting thread on Boards.ie from four years ago regarding the use of Z-wave in a house.

I was wondering what people would recommend in terms of lighting systems for a full renovation job on a house in 2018? Ideally, I would be interested in:

• Ability to have scene set lighting from switchplates
• Good choice of switchplates
• Good choice of lighting products. The quality and appearance of the lights is more important to me than the ability to switch them on using a smart phone so I wouldn't want to be tied to a restrictive system

If there are any good suppliers in Ireland worth speaking with, it would be great to know as well. Insteon takes me to a assistive technology website in Ireland and the website link on the Fibaro page doesn't work either! My concern is going with an obsolete or unsupported technology would leave me open to another big refurb job in a few year time.

Cheers.

Metric Tensor

Z Wave, ZigBee, etc are wireless systems - if you are doing a deep refurb including rewiring I'd go fully wired if possible for consistency and stability reasons.

Control4 and Loxone are two systems I know of but I have not used either so I couldn't recommend one.

If you wore it correctly then it should be possible to retask the relevant wires to different system in future if the selected one goes by the wayside.

At a minimum you a talking a live a neutral to all switches along with an adjacent Cat5 wire. To take it to the next step each independent light or set should be wired independently back to the consumer unit. All of this will cost a nice bit more due to the extra wiring and the fact that it's out of the ordinary to the electrician.

Obviously if you are not doing a full rewire you are restricted to wireless and even further restricted if there is no neutral wire to the light switches, which is common enough in Ireland. For wireles I can definitely recommend fibaro z-wave devices.

The "Home Automation" forum here on boards is the place to read! Can't post a link because I'm on the phone.

Victorian House

Thanks, Metric!

The forum link is here for anybody who looks at this thread.

I'll do a bit more digging on that forum before posting again.

thesteve

To be honest these days Philips Hue is a lot simpler and getting to be pretty versatile.

Tefral

Look up lightwaverf

Frank Rizzo

Irish supplier of zwave products. www.zwave.ie