I’m at the stage where my renovation is 7 months into the 12 and all the walls are still open for me to change anything from a cabling perspective.
I have Unifi WAPs, DALI light switches being installed, presence sensors (FP2s) in every room, BigAss fans, Unifi cameras, iPads in the wall for my UI, AC integrated, Sonos throughout, irrigation, garden hue lighting and Aqara door locks.
Can you think of anything I should/could cable for, whilst it’s cheaper to do so?
Door and window sensors, temperature, humidity, voice assistant, CO2/fire/water leak alarms, power metering for essential hardware, like washing machine, dishwasher, dryer, freezer and fridge.
Personal suggestion: run multiple cat6 drops to every room, even if you don’t think you’ll need it.
You can use the 8 cores for a bunch of stuff in a pinch - Poe, audio, hdmi, usb, IR & hardwired sensors just off the top of my head.
Bonus points if you also add a pull string & leave plenty of room in the conduits for future proofing.
What about 4 core cable for electric blinds to each window?
Speaker cable for surround speakers too?
I second what @ShadowFist said about the CAT6 cable drops to each room especially behind your entertainment unit. The best approach with data cable is, if it is a stationary device, hard wire it. If it’s mobile then go wireless.
We built a new home about 6 years ago and ran 72x CAT6 and it was well worth it.
Good luck with the build. Don’t forget to write on the concrete slab/floor where and at what height your face plate/cabling should be at.
When doing cabling today then go for category 6a cabling.
Category 6 has a maximum length of 55m, but each joint will lower this, so the 100m for 6a is just to be sure for the future.
Also remember that wall drops are fragile, so make sure you have spare cable behind the drop and can replace the wall drop itself from the front.
I have also found that wall drops that are connected 90 degrees on the wall are often hit be people or furniture being moved around, so if you can then go for recessed wall drops or one that are angled, so the connection is parallel with the wall, which also makes the cable drawing prettier.
Forgot about electric blinds, that’s now on the list
Hey Ben. I’m in a similar situation to you, with a house half-way constructed. My plans also call for unifi APs, presence sensors, BigAss fans, AC integration, and provision for irrigation and security.
Like you I have chosen to implement DALI for all lighting. I’m curious to know what control solution you came up with. In another thread you mentioned DALI/MQTT. I presume you’re using dali2mqtt? What hardware interface did you choose and are you happy with it?
Because I’m in Australia, some things (especially obscure electrical things) can be expensive and/or time consuming to import. I don’t mind paying (or waiting a long time) for things which work well so it’d be fantastic to hear about your experiences and recommendations.
(Right now I’m planning to use Lunatone wall switches & sensors. Their switch cross wall switch is nice for its simplicity and configuration depth. I have been able to configure them over the DALI bus with Lunatone’s cockpit software. But I’m really disappointed with Lunatone for their barely functional APIs, for which I was prepared to write a custom Home Assistant integration in Python.)
Hey Simon,
I’m planning to use ZenControl and i’m playing with it right now, a couple of months before the install happens. I’m not overly impressed with the UX and the lack of documentation at this stage but I got through the early years of Home Assistant so pretty sure i’ll get there.
I’m also in Australia (Brisbane).
I plan to use my developers to create the nodered node for this platform so that I can do all my automations in the same place that I currently do for HA.
Wow okay, our situations are eerily similar. I’ve been bench testing DALI components for a few months as well. ZenControl stuff is expensive, which is fine in theory, so long as it can do what I want it to. But I wasn’t able to confirm that by reading their available documentation.
Last night I got my first lights controllable from the ZenControl light switch, once i’ve mastered sequences and triggers, I’m ready to start trying to hook it up to HA via mqtt. It’s going to be very manual, no doubt without any automatic detection of devices and their types.
I think the thread has now changed to another topic so i’ll stop here and will make a new thread on my progress/challenges.
@simondotau feel free to DM me.