When I built, a few years ago, I had little knowledge of cbus and not much in the way of local expertise to advise me of best options. As a result, I have 7 8-channel dimmer modules and 6 12-channel relay modules in my place. This has all been well and good. The reason for using dimmers for most of the lighting circuits was that if/when we decided we wanted to use dimmable lighting, we could. At the time, all the lighting (apart from specific task lighting) were 7 and 13W CFLs, and the lighting circuits are switched from 0% to 100% - in effect, being used as "relays". The problem is that with so many channels, the leakage current across the triacs, multiplied by the number of channels, makes quite a lot of base load. Even if it's just two watts, thats 100 watts. May seem like nothing, but it's 20% of my base load. If the leakage is more than 2W the problem is worse. This wouldn't be an issue for most people - but I'm not most people. I'm off-grid. No grid power available. I'm wondering if anyone, anywhere, has a trade-in/trade-up/cross-trade program for perfectly good but "unsuitable" product? Or does anyone have a relay (or a bunch of relays) (needs to be 8 or more channels, obviously) they'd like to swap/exchange for dimmers? I asked my local clipsal agent, who seemed interested in helping but after 4 months hasn't managed to do anything.... so thought I'd ask here.
