Clipsal end user Installation.Your opinion

Hello,

What's your opinions about the installation of clipsal with 2-3 dimmers, 1 relay and 10-15 switches?
I am wondering if is necessary to use a trained Clipsal installer or if you are an electrician you could manage to install it and programme it.
Please your opinions.

Thanks

 

The install you described is pretty basic, depending on the switch (key input unit) types you use you may have pretty basic control options available. Lets pretent you are going to use Saturn with one DLT... It is not "necessary" to use a "trained Clipsal installer", if you know how to drive a PC, can understand USB comm devices etc you can get the software for free and off you go. If you are only talking about the one site (eg your place) then you are going to have to cough up for a PC interface to get the little electrons from your PC onto the C-Bus network. If this is the case you may as well cough that little bit bigger and get a CTouch. This way you will have the immense power of PICED plus you can use the CTouch to get the PC electrons onto the bus to program the units.

Using a "trained Clipsal installer" does not guarantee you will get someone who knows what they are doing. If you are the "electrician" you referred to in your post then I would recommend you have a go yourself because by today's standards an electrician who can't use a system like C-Bus is missing out on lots of business opportunity.

If the install is a customers house and you are not up to speed at this point, it would pay to get someone in to help you set the system up. This way the customer doesn't get a junk result, you get to learn a bit along the way and you have bought some time to get yourself into a C-Bus Basic Training Course.

 

An electrician could probably handle it if they read the training manuals first, but a better approach is to do the training course. When I did it, at the end of the course they gave me a dimmer, two Neo eight button switches and interface to connect a PC (running Toolkit) to the C-Bus network. I mounted all the gear they gave me on to a test board with eight lamps and then had a really good play. It was a good way of reinforcing what I learnt at the course. Later I removed all the gear from the test board I installed it in my new house.

The course was excellent and coupled with the 'free' gear was good value.