C-Bus in an old house

Hi All,
Been reading up and trying to get my head around what I'd like to do.
We have an old house with pre-existing, standard wiring. We are going to do some fairly major renovations at some stage so for some parts of the house changing to cbus shouldn't be too difficult. (ie upstairs as there is access to roof space)

The hard part is the downstairs and parts that are harder to get to. I've heard cbus in a renovation is difficult.....

For some things like existing light fittings what is mostly done?
1) keep existing wiring, try and track it from the fitting and rewire back to the cbus panel
2) Run completely new wiring to the existing light fittings and cap the old ones. May have to add false ceilings etc.
3) Try cbus wireless (not sure if that is what it can do or how reliable wireless comms is)

Thanks Josh

 

Best option really would be to start from scratch. Run a feed from the main switch board to a C-bus board then to your light fittings. And remove old cabling where you can using the old cable from light switches a draw wire for the c-bus cable.

The difficulty as you say is the ground floor. How hard that is depends on a few things, like how easy it is to get into the ceiling space and of course how deep your renovations are. If for example you happy cutting access holes and the like then maybe not so bad.

As for false ceilings why would you need to do that anywhere? Would have thought if you were thinking of a false ceiling it would be better to just remove the existing ceiling and replace, but again depends how deep your renos is.

 

Using wireless for downstairs locations that are hard to reach via cable is a good and quick option (worked for me ). Just try and get the wireless bridge downstairs in the middle of the house as range is rapidly diminished as you go though multiple walls. It's certainly possible to get cabling through to the down stairs with the right tools, but it's time consuming.

Rewiring the upper floor is quite straight forward if you have good roof access. Just start from scratch and wire from the light fittings back to a central location (or two). Sometimes you can use the existing switch cable to pull through a cbus cable, but it's easy enough to drill down through the top plate directly over the existing switch hole. Cbus topology is very flexible.

 

The ceiling of the lower floor is Bondek/Concrete. The existing lights are surface mount with the wires through the concrete. Wife is happy with a false ceiling (makes it look nicer) adding a few cm so that is how I can get a new wires.

How reliable is it? I've had some Z-Wave stuff in the past and it could be hit and miss sometimes.

Josh

 

As wireless systems go it is much better than most, but in the end it is still wireless and will never be a reliable as good old fashion cable. With a concrete ceiling you will definitely need to locate the wireless router downstairs as the floor will be reinforced and act like a giant Faraday shield. For normal on/off and dimming control it works very reliably but don't expect to trigger huge wireless scenes.

I installed wireless downstairs as a temporary measure until I could get cables through and most of the wireless is still there 8 years later, so I guess that tells you something

 

Hasn't the cbus wireless stuff been discontinued?

Do the hard yards straight up and do it properly..

 

All C-Bus wireless wall switches are discontinued; Available C-Bus wireless products are Plugs, Remote, and Gateway.

 

Schneider strikes again

 

Okay thanks, I guess it's all new wiring......

Was hoping that maybe wireless switches might be able to be used for some locations that are too difficult. They might just have to change to the 240V Saturn range. At least they still match...... for now.

Thanks Josh

 

Does the discontinuation mean that there will be none availability for replacement of units that fail?

What about repairs?