Hello from Colorado

[patterrr]

I'm new to the forum (obviously that's why I'm posting here...) Have been following forum for quite some time and finally took the effort to join.

I'm an electrical & computer engineer by profession, hobby, and lifelong interest. I take DIY in home automation to an extreme. Right now my home automation sytem is 100% my own design, from the hardware to the firmware to the software. This includes a whole-house ethernet and RS-485 network to connect everything, and then dozens of various sensors, and even my own AC light dimmers (using my own IGBT design).

Anyways, my wife and I will bought some land and will be building a custom house in a few years. I will probably still do most of my own design for the home automation hardware, and definitely my own for the software. However, when it comes to the AC wiring of the house, I want to go with an off-the-shelf product this time so it's UL certified and all that other junk that inspectors like to see... So hence my I follow these forums - I'm very mixed at this point about what kind of off-the-shelf hardware to use for the AC (basically light control - I'm still going to do my own outlet control), so I enjoy reading other's insight here.

Am looking forward to finally being a member!

BTW - now that I'm a member, I tried to private message somebody to ask them a detail about a post four years ago, but get this message "You are not allowed to use the messenger feature on this board". Anybody know what this is about? Is private messaging totally turned off in these forums?

 

[Steve]

Welcome to CocoonTech!

Sounds like some quite impressive work you've done. In regard to PM it is turned off until you reach a certain number of posts, I think around 3 in order to reduce spam by potential bots. It will activate automatically or you can ask Dan to turn it on for you.

As for the lighting I'm sure if you've been reading you know by now there a few basic categories of lighting as follows:

Hardwired with central control and low voltage switches. This requires special wiring to home run all loads. An example of this would be Centralite.

Then you have the hardwire control but with standard wiring. This would be ALC.

Then there are all the more retrofit friendly systems either power line based like UPB or Insteon and the wireless ZWave and Zigbee as well as the higher end Lutron RadioRa2.

Lots of choices depending on what specifics you want...

 

[George M]

As a fellow Colorado member, welcome. You can learn many things here. Having just built my son's house using Zwave, I know how exciting it can be to investigate the new technologies.

George M

 

[patterrr]

Thanks for the welcome and tips!

So far I've mainly only looked at Z-Wave, Insteon, and UPB, but not sure why because I'm primarily interested in hard wiring for the new house. Steve, thanks for the info on the hardwire control. I think it'll be most appropriate for me to start a thread on this in the HA area because I'd like to talk more about my options and choices; I'll do that here in the next few days.

Geoge, is your son interested in showing off his now Z-Wave system (assuming your in the Denver area)? I'd love to see a real demo of the technology!

Ryan

 

[George M]

Geoge, is your son interested in showing off his now Z-Wave system (assuming your in the Denver area)? I'd love to see a real demo of the technology!

Ryan

Since I designed a "Grandpa's Wing" on the home for future use, I'm sure it would be OK.
PM me your email and I will contact you.