C-bus wireless V x10

Hi all,
A bit of background, I am in the process of building a house with building company, and the cost of installing a wired C-bus system was huge, mostly because it had to go through their company etc, hence I started looking at installing X10 products once the building was complete.

Can the good people on the c-bus forums tell me the differences between C-bus wireless and the X 10 products?
I?m talking functionality, features, usability, i.e does the C-bus wireless address the faults /issues (i.e slow response. you know the issues,) of the X10 system or is the same thing with a clipsal sticker on it?

I'm happy pay extra to install a superior product.

Thanks

 

Thanks Daniel,
I have read the thread and in the process of re reading it, it focuses on the cbus system i.e. the normal "wired" solution and not specifically the cbus "wireless" solution.

Does c-bus wireless address the 256 device limit?
R hamer wrote "X10 is about the most unreliable control system I have ever had the misfortune of trying to use." why is c-bus wireless more reliable?

I understand the differences from a c-bus "wired" solution against using existing wiring for X10. C-bus will win hands down.

But why is the c-bus "wireless" solution (which uses existing wiring) better than X10?

Again I ask, does the C-bus ?wireless? solution address the faults /issues of the X10 system or is the same thing with a clipsal sticker on it?

thanks

 

C-Bus Wireless devices communicate in an entirely different way to X-10 devices. X-10 devices use mains signalling on top of the 240V wiring. C-Bus Wireless devices communicate using encrypted radio frequency. The 240V mains connections are used to power the units and to control the load only.

 

And I still stand by that comment

Cheers

Rohan

 

While I have never had the privileged of using X10, I will attempt to answer the question

X10 was designed to work over power lines (already stated). These are notoriously noisy and any data that is to be sent across them is slow (to overcome bad data and limitations of the technology) and susceptible to data loss.

Wireless C-bus only uses the power lines for power, not for data. The wireless comms is a dedicated network for C-bus commands only. It is much faster and not competing with noise from the power lines like X10.

You can see this difference in the M1 alarm panel. it supports both X10 and C-bus. X10 commands can only be sent at 1 per second. C-bus are sent much faster than this and they have a setting in the config to allow for this difference.

So C-Bus is not a re-badged X10 product and by going with C-bus you will have no regrets. You will still need a wired portion of the network for all your loads (lights) that are connected to dimmers and relays, so thinking that you can just screw in the new switches and get the lot going is over-simplifying it considerably. Some thought needs to be put into the wiring of the loads so that you can easily retrofit the hardware afterwards.

Mick

 

Not quite right here. You can buy the C-bs Wireless switches with inbuilt dimmers and relays (Up to 2 channels i think) so in fact if you don't have anymore then 2 switched loads in a location (or happy to join some together) you can just pull off the 240V switches and swap them with C-Bus wireless ones.

As ashleigh said range can be an issue with the switches so do try to keep the distance (and building materials) between switches to a few metres.

 

Yeah sorry my bad - thanks for correcting me

Mick

 

Thanks all for your responses, It was a huge help.
anyone know any installers to quote up a solution in the western suburbs of Melbourne?