how to control Air cond from cbus

The only real option you have other than a touch screen is to use an IR repeater system like Frank's one that I mentioned earlier. This option would still allow you to control C-Bus devices if you placed one of the other system's transmitters so that it could be received by your touch screen, or by another c-bus reciever.

I apologise for my incorrect assumption before.

Even using Frank's system, you would still be able to use the Clipsal remote.

Once again, sorry for my mistake earlier, I'm still learning myself.

Regards,

Darpa

 

I'm with you now... Will check out the site and thanks for your help...

 

I agree - No way I'd be switching a 35A A/Cond on and off at the Mains like that... they are not designed to be controlled that way. If they use a IR remote, then that's how you should control it - by IR !

In fact, I think the whole inquiry is somewhat suspect... who in their right mind would RECESS (hide) a Split system into a wall... when you could just go and buy a proper ducted / console unit for the similar price, and get proper thermostat, control etc. There are A/C systems specifically designed for "hidden" installations !
- No way I reckon the Split will work properly anyway... how's it going to suck and blow air properly if it's recessed / hidden? How will you clean the filters?

It's all about COST and complexity... why run heaps and heaps of switched ANE's from one side of the house to the other? Why not get a few unswitched ANE's and a Cat5 over there, then split off from there to the loads? A typical 2 or 3 bedroom house with a decent, flexible lighting system is still going to need 50 or so C-Bus controlled loads... so why not save the cable and put the C-Bus units in a couple of places, rather than in some huge big meter box or whatever...

Think of a Cabana down in the backyard, with 5 lighting circuits plus 3 x Irrigation controls, a pool pump and a master power "on/off".... it'd be silly to run 10 x switched ANE's for all those loads down from the house to the backyard - although that is EXACTLY what most electricians do ! It's much better and easier to send 1 x Cat5 and 1 x 20A or 32A Mixed Circuit down there, then put the respective C-Bus devices in the Cabana. Furthermore, if you wanted to add a exterior ceiling fan in the Cabana later, there's no need to pull another switched ANE down there, you just wire it up "locally" - the existing Cat5 is the "switch wire" !

Same with the house itself - you'd use many many MANY hundreds of metres of 1.5 T+E wiring even a relatively simple C-bus system if you have to take every single load back to a central place. Think of what C-Bus Lighting Control is for - you use a single loop of Cat5 to do all your switching, and don't have to have millions of switch wires running everywhere. If you are gunna run everything in 240V, then you lose a lot of the flexibility and convenience that the system is designed to offer you !

I just rewired my own house (non-C-Bus) and added a lot of separate circuits for extra lights (6 total) and A/C (5 total). I can tell you that dragging and clipping just those 11 cables from one side of the (small 2/3 bed) house was an absolute pain in the a*** ! I can't imagine what a hassle it'd be to do it with 40 or 50 cables !

However... my advice doesn't matter much, because it's still the most common practice to put everything (C-Bus) in one place irrespective of how hard and costly it makes the resultant installation ! The reason this happens is that electricians are still thinking in "240V language"... they are wiring up C-bus like standard 240V wiring, and using the Cbus kind of like a Contactor. That is NOT what Control Systems are all about, but it's hard to break past the original training and "normal way to do things" (in 240V) and start thinking outside the square

When C-Bus was originally designed, the idea was that all the devices would be remote - a maximum of 2 or 4 loads to each one. You then run a "ring" of unswitched Mains to all the C-Bus "Pods" in the ceiling. A short (say 1-2m) cable links each light to a "Pod". Then, you run 1 x Cat5 around to join up the Pods and the switches... save a fortune in switch wires and complexity !

That is the reason for devices like the 1Ch relay... they were designed to go inside a fluorescent luminaire (one per light). Imagine then how you could re-configure the partitions in an office and only have to re-do the C-Bus programming to change the switching etc because every load has individual (distributed) control ! To do that same thing using the "new way of wiring" would be almost impossible

But somehow over the years, that "distributed control" idea has become lost... it is now deemed the norm to add MORE cable when you use C-Bus!

Cheers - John

 

I like your thinking John, ALOT!

And just so you know before I say this, I am 22, I do not have a Sparky's license, although I have spent many many months of my life doing their job, albeit under the supervision of somone who is qualified and licensed.

I have a hell of alot of respect for your opinion, and everything you have said makes complete and utter sense, and I am very glad that you have brought these trains of thought to my attention. I am looking to enter the Systems Integration and Automation industry, and I would much rather be learning these things NOW, rather than after I have done a heap of training, and "learnt" bad habits in the process of learning from other people.

I know this probably sounds like I'm sucking up, but I'm not. I just wanted to say thankyou for your post, it has validated my train of thought about controlling the A/C units earlier in this thread, and also taught me something new, and thats why I'm on here, to learn, not just to post about things I've already learnt in life.

Kindest Regards,

Drew

 

I partially agree, but I'd rather blow my money on cable (In my case I went through 1500m, 36sq house single story) than have to troubleshoot dimmer/relay units in several areas. Bigger buildings make sense to split up as do shed/outdoor living areas but not splitting front/back of house. My shed is not up yet but theres a cbus cable running there to control future shed/garden equipment.

The other advantage you have with a central location is say, if a room has 4 circuits (And most rooms have more than one circuit), they can be split onto several dimmer/relay units providing redundancy if you loose a unit. Repairing/replacing the unit may only take a few days, but try telling the missus she will be without bathroom lights for that time

 

Are you implying that Dimmers and Relays need troubleshooting? My experience in many many large and small installs is that the Cbus is a lot more reliable than troubleshooting / tracing hundreds of cables radiating out all over the place In fact, I've only found 2 faulty units in over 10 years, both were dimmers with "control-side" problems (they still powered the loads, but acted silly).

Also if you are troubleshooting, it is a HELL of a lot easier not to have to manually over-ride a channel and then walk all the way to the other end of the house to see what happened. Trust me, I've done so much troubleshooting of other peoples installs - I would much rather have all the devices controlling a floor to be at least ON THAT FLOOR, rather than in a basement or garage etc !

I agree with that - and also that there are certain economies in being able to share a (say 8ch) dimmer with 4 running one half of the house and the other 4 running the other half of the house. But I didn't say 1 Output Device per room... there is nothing stopping you splitting rooms across devices. I just say it's silly to ALWAYS put everything in one huge central location.

But once again I state that all this "wire it all in one huge box" stuff is not particlarly relevant if it's only done on the OFF-CHANCE that there might perhaps be a potential problem witha C-Bus unit sometime in the future

You have to very carefully offset that (potential advantage) against the severe lack of future flexibility of essentially hard-wiring your whole house. Because if all your C-Bus is in one place, and you want to add a extra lighting load in an upstairs bedroom in 2 years time... how exactly are you going to achieve that - pull another switched load cable up there from your central C-Bus Board ?

Cheers, John

 

I'm not suggesting that I expect to find constant faults with the system, far from it otherwise I would never have installed it! Coming from an IT background, I have always found centralisation of services to a certain extent is beneficial. At no stage did I suggest that this covers all cases...

My situation being a single story home, makes sense to have one location and as I stated, the shed/backyard is separate which agrees with yourself. If I built a double story, I would have a separate cabinet for each floor. I just don't believe in installing one relay in a cupboard, one in the kitchen pantry etc as although this requires less cabling and perhaps greater flexibility with installing new services, would be harder to troubleshoot, especially if it has been completed by someone other than yourself and the client is unsure where the devices are.

A disadvantage is on the odd chance that you need a dimmer circuit and the "Local" unit is full, yet 5 spare channels exist at the other end of the house, you're still talking of a long cable run anyway. Its horses for courses...

As I do have everything centralised, to offset issues with installing extra services, I have run extra cabling, installed drawwires to cover almost every situation. This is on top of the high saturation of services that are currently installed. Yes this possibly is not feasible as a paying client does not see the cost benefit but for my own home, it makes sense...

 

Sorry, Skyline - I didn't mean to offend or attack you personally... and I hope you didn't take it that way

Don't worry - I'm not trying to start an argument... It might be that you've only ever seen you OWN installation, or a couple of good ones. But I assure you that I have spent weeks on sites trying to unravel the mess caused by dumb installations. And the more centralised they are, the worse a mess they tend to be in.

Is it only me that always seems to be the guy who's called in to tell the client that "no, you can't add another light there" because the dumb installers centrally mounted all the C-Bus and didn't allow ANY spare cables to anywhere (ie: wired it up to the original plans). And the client thinks that because it's C-Bus it's flexible so adding a light would be easy - yet if it's wired centrally then it is often LESS flexible than standard hard-wiring !

Oh well, maybe I've just had bad experiences with sorting out "Centralised C-Bus" installs

Anyway, I'm just stirring up some brain matter by trying to make installers THINK before they jam everything in one bloody great big cupboard, creating an absolute disaster for the End-User and almost precluding any modifications required in the future

The best solution is to carefully think about the installation, and decide on the best combination of distributed and centralised C-Bus. Smaller pockets of C-Bus on each floor make things considerably easier to install, troubleshoot and modify. If you have access to the ceiling space (ie: pitched roof single-story) then it's not that critical - you can always crawl through and add more cables fairly easily.

But if you have concrete slabs and multiple floors... or if you have a large, long single-story house... I cannot see any disadvantage whatsoever in having C-Bus Output devices in a centralised sub-group that lives close to the loads that they control. It sure makes for a neater and easier to work on installation down the track !

Cheers, John

 

Gentlemen

Be very careful with Air-Conditioners. There are a number of reasons to look before you leap. We've been bitten more than once trying to do this (use IR codes).

Firstly, a large number of airconditioners have real-time clock functionality. When you learn a seemingly simple IR string, you are recording the current time/date too. When you blast this string out, you are sending the time and date of when you learned the command..... A bit of a trap.

Secondly, a lot of air-conditioner have very long command strings which is difficult (or impossible) to learn correctly. Part of the string may be truncated and you lose part of your command. It will appear to learn ok, but some of the fucntionality can be lost. We spent many hours with this problem. CIS tech support also spent many hours too on the site.

It isn't as simple as it may look.

Cheers

 

I can only agree with Conformist, they look simple but some systems are impossible to learn. I know some work has been done in this area of extra code lenghts but if I was doing an A/C integration job now the first thing I'd do is make sure the A/C is on the secret list

cheers