OWNERSHIP of Clipsal file.

Hi all I am new to this & am an end user, I built my own home a few years back & have clipsal controlling all lighting & heating. When first programmed it was done as a temporary measure until I had the funds to expand the system & once I had a better idea how I wanted everything to look & work.

I think my question is simple, do I have the right to request the file from the company who installed it for either myself to work with or a different engineer? Surely I own it as I paid for all the hardware & engineers costs.

Also I had seen a post on here explaining the possibility the file exists within the system or a touch screen? I have a black & white touch screen, should a good engineer be able to extract it, I believe he called it a project file?

I am not totally against going back to the orig engineers however they have annoyed me slightly as I recently requested the file so I could keep a back up of it & they told me clipsal don't like us handing out the files..... I think they are just protecting there interests.....

Can anyone spread any light on this as surely I should own the file & should be able to have it if I request it?

 

As far as I see it, you own the file because you paid for the job. And yes they are feeding you BS about handing out the files. If Clipsal had concerns like that then the toolkit would not be available to anyone to use.

You can connect up to the system and download the configuration. You would not have all the groups as names only numbers which you would then have to rename. Depending on how complicated the system is this could be trivial or it could be extensive.

The file should always stay with the system.

 

As stated, you dont lose the setup when the installer leaves, but some will say otherwise.

All you lose is the naming tags given to each load channel. So instead of seeing <13> in your setup you might read "LAUNDRY" as a name tag.

These tags are stored in the original folder of the job. You may as well just create the entire tagging from scratch using a fresh copy of the toolkit. It will take you a few hours and you will have the satisfaction of knowing what everything does.

The touch panel is similarly downloaded back to PICED and modified.

Installers used to have the advantage with alarm panels and phone systems, where the master laptop held crucial setup files. But with CBUS you do not have these restrictions, as the information is always stored inside the installed CBUS equipment.

In the very early days, they didnt have name tags. People used Excel to store that information and printed the outputs on A4 paper.