Minimum Hardware

My second newbie question sorry.

I'm looking at doing a retrofit install in phases on a single story 70s suburban in Sydney. Initially I will be looking at doing 1 bedroom, wir, on-suit. Give or take 5 circuits for lights, 2 movement sensors and 6 double power sockets.

With this kind of setup what is the minimum hardware requirements. I can work out what sockets etc, I am thinking more what rail hardware.

I would like lights to be dimmable, and also be able to monitor total power usage including anything plugged into wall sockets.

My plan it to manage everything through a wiser.

Thanks in advance for any advise.

Cheers.

 

Where do you intend to have the wiring installed ? Are you creating a sub-board in the house ? Where will it be ?

 

Hi Tobex,

My thinking was to have 2 sub-boards. The house is 4 bed, open plan living area and triple garage. All bedrooms are at one end of the house.

As a result I was thinking 1 sub-board at the bedroom end of the house and this would be the initial phase that I'm trying to work out the required hardware.

Then ultimately another board in the garage for the front of the house and garden.

Cheers

 

If the garage is less than 30 metres from the bedrooms then you are going to find that the cost of the additional sub-board enclosure is somewhat more than the cost of the additional copper wire. You are basically trying to remove the complexity from the house itself and centralise the power sources to one area where it would not be noticed. What I tend to find is that for bedrooms space is at a high premium and anything in that area which removes space ends up being stored in the garage. As a rule, things with hum or emit EMF / EMR such as power boards are best placed in a cool area. I have only seen secondary sub-boards in kitchens and on 3rd or 4th levels. Single level houses do not benefit from having many distribution panels other than those placed indoors behind metering and kitchen.

Kitchens can sometimes benefit from having a sub-board nearby. It helps with isolation.

 

Thanks tobex, I will keep that in mind.

Regarding the question about minimum rail hardware requirements what do you think a good starting point would be?

fyi, I made my first c-bus purchase today, a couple of sensors for less than 1/2 retail. Thanks for the advise in my other post

 

I have bought rails 12 to 20 wide in the past.

From the guidelines written by Clipsal I use
- Switch (on/off master) - 1 pole
- Over voltage protection (970RM) - 1 pole
- C-Bus unit - 12 pole
- optional **** wiring management equipment such as WAGO 280 series wiring management. - 4-6 pole

18-20 pole would be your practical size.

I find that 90% of people are not interested in the WAGO technology. But I prefer to have a clean layout for the additional earth and neutral wires caused by having up to 14 loads associated with one C-Bus module. The narrow cabling modules take very little space and push in like the clipsal push-in termination Power Point. The WAGO technology is used by me because KRONE no longer sells the 400V technology and these blocks are useful for controlling large amounts of Earth and Neutral wiring in a small space. You can easily and quickly punch down 14 neutrals and 14 earth wires in the remaining 4 or 6 poles as suggested above.

Bear in mind that if you have a Cbus module which has a built-in network power supply, then you must handle those wires too.

Each load has 3 wires with up 4 to 12 loads.
The Power supply might be present and has 3 wires
The main unit input takes 3 wires.

3 x 14 = 42 wires and that assumes you have one cable per load. Some people use one cable per fitting. In my opinion you always need extra space for wire management.



I only offer this information as general knowledge and endorse it as my personal opinion.

 

Doing a C-Bus install bit-by-bit is not the most efficient way to go about things, but the cost is certainly an issue so I can understand why you may want to do it this way.

What I would suggest you do is work out exactly which ciruits you want to switch and dim across the whole house up-front; effectively planning the whole install. Then, work out where you can slice it up into convenient chunks.

Regarding the DIN requirements, The C-Bus DIN Relays come in 4, 8 and 12 channel units. The C-Bus DIN Dimmers also come in 4 & 8 channel Leading Edge and 4 channel Universal types. These units are mostly 12 modules long (12 circuit breakers wide) with the exception of the 4-chanel Relay unit which is 8 modules wide.

These units are available with or without a built-in power supply for the C-Bus network, to power the bus devices.

If you want to monitor the power consumption you will need to use a C-Bus Current Measurement Unit. It is a 4-module wide DIN unit and it has 4 Current Transformer probes that clip around the supply cable for the circuit of interest. You can have many of these on a network but you can only keep the historical data for up to 4 monitored circuits on the Wiser, as the data uses lots and lots of memory.

There isn't a C-Bus device that can monitor the power used by a single appliance... unless you have a CT connected to the feed for that specific socket output connected to a Current Measurement Unit.

Regarding your desire to switch the wall sockets, the easiest way to do this is leave the GPO's as-is, i.e. hard wired, and use the C-Bus Wireless plug adaptors. They are available in dimmer or relay versions and just plug in-line with the device you're wanting to control. To make wired C-Bus talk to these wireless devices you need a Wireless Gateway connected to the network. You can then move them around freely as needed, rather than using up lots of expensive DIN relay channels making every outlet switchable.