Landscape lighting help needed

[JoltElectric]

My client wants to turn on all of his landscape lighting from his house, and also maybe wirelessly from his hot tub, and have it run on photo cells and a timer in normal operation. I have installed all the lighting to run on regular malibu transformers from Home Depot. I need to be able to turn them on, they are on a pool house about 30 feet away from the main house. I was thinking of using z-wave devices, and just putting the switches in the poolhouse electrical panel, with the main z-wave switch in the main house. I need a way to have the switches controlled with a timer also. Any suggestions? Should I use Insteon instead?

 

[DavidL]

You can use either Insteon or Z-Wave or UPB for that matter. But, use an appliance relay to supply the 110 to the current transformer / timer. Lock the timer out from ever turning off and then use a software system to time all the lights.

Cinemar has developed a NEMA rated touchscreen for usage outdoors (hot tub) for this purpose. We displayed it at the EHX show in Long Beach a month ago. Basically, a metal box with a sealed touchscreen that connects via VGA to a PC. We used a Cat5 baluns for connecting the touchscreen and serial (mouse) connection.

One of our customers (MarkP) just did exactly what you are mentioning with Insteon controlling hundreds of lighting loads, including high amperage ones. For additional ideas, he also used a wireless serial commincation device to control his Jandy hot tub from MainLobby. He used a free plugin as the software interface from MainLobby Server to the Jandy.

 

[Steve]

I believe Dave (Event5) also did something very similar for a customer with straight UPB - no controllers or anything.