Just had a call from a fellow sparky that come across an install that has the original C-Bus units installed. The system is currently having intermittent faults where only half of the system works It is apparently a horrific install with the c-bus units installed in the roof cavity above the switchboard! Hearing this was enough for me to wave the white flag and tell him that I am not going near the place to even help diagnose. He agreed that it's a disaster and was off to tell the owner that they need to get the system compliant to AS:3000, let alone installed to acceptable C-Bus standards. Got me curious though. I have never worked on the older units. Are they compatible with the current gear?
All the original units are fully supported and work fine with current toolkit. The original power supply units had a limited life though (like 10 years or so), so that's the first (and simplest) place to look. A 20 year old original power supply that still worked would be a collectors item.
Cheers Ashley. Will point him in that direction if he ends up going back. I was stunned that the units were still working - especially if the install was as bad as he said.
Whilst being an old installation, would just look at replacing those 2 power supplies and see how the site performs. I still service a site that has many of these relays installed from 1998, only as late as last week I discovered one of those old power supplies (hidden in ceiling space) causing issues on the network, once I removed it the network was good as new.
Seri Serious question but what is wrong with what is in the photo? Whilst one wouldn’t do it that way now from what I see all the 240v parts are isolated sufficiently to comply with basic safety standards (the plastic strips over the terminals) and the DIN mounted hardware is inside an appropriate enclosure. My first house (circa 2000) was done in a similar way to this and passed all safety standards.
There were other areas of the install discussed that don't comply to AS:3000 - I shuddered at the pic as it's an indication of the quality of work in the installation. Basic stuff like the Cbus cable not being sheathed near the 240 cable/terminations, some of the TPS is stripped back too far so single insulated 240 touching unsheathed twisted pair, unused twisted pair hanging in the breeze, Cbus cables and mains through the same holes, etc.
Kind of agree with Ashley here You have to remeber back when this system was installed there was no such thing as Pink UTP so installers just had to do there best with the UTP available at the time, and there was no RJ45 sockets on the i\units to plug the cable into. Also the old C-Bus units were not designed to fit on Din Rail so not easy to mount in switchboards and there also wasnt much room to terminate the 230v cabling in the units.
Got a few of you ol' boys triggered with my comment, hey??? I'm sure every young tradie looks back at old installations asking themselves "WTF?!" But that means standards are improving - not that the old way was wrong. As I said my main gripe in that pic was the basics - not taping back unused pairs, removing TPS sheath too far, not keeping separation of low voltage cable and comms/phone cable. Spoke to the standard of the installation.
