C-Bus Wireless - Reliability any good?

I'm slightly biased, but I think C-Bus Wireless is an excellent ad-on to a C-Bus wired system as you describe.

I don't use it for dimming (although in summer I do use a LE plug adapter on a pedestal fan), but I have panel heaters and the coffee machine on relay plug adaptors and they are 99% reliable.

The single biggest thing I found you can do to ensure reliable operation of the wireless side is to make sure that it's not overloaded with traffic

1) Make sure the application addresses are set to connect only 2 specific applications (eg $38 and $CA) and not set to $FF $FF (this passes everything through and will just bog down the wireless side). Ideally, create a separate lighting application just for the wireless side (and use the secondary application in the wired switches you are using to control them) - this way the only traffic in the wireless side is the stuff going to the plug adaptors and not everything else on applicaiton $38

2) If you have any touchscreens or Wiser, make sure that in the "Network Manager" (Project->C-Bus Networks), all of the additional applications for the wireless network are set to No. If not, then every message your Touchscreen sends on those applications will also be sent to the Wireless network.

Nick

 

I'm very biassed.

But I also have 2 separate C-Bus wireless networks in my house (no wired at all), and it never misses a beat. For small clusters it works exceptionally well.

If you link to wired - then see what NickD wrote: pushing all your wired traffic into the wireless side will lead to terrible performance. Wireless data rate is slower than wired, and traffic with nowhere to go gets retried which makes a bad situation worse. Limit the traffic being fed into the wireless side for good performance.