Lutron vs. LiteTouch vs. CBus

[DJK]

Hi all,

I've got a new construction, 105 load system narrowed down to Lutron, LiteTouch and CBus. It seems to me that Lutron is the biggest and works well with AMX, Litetouch has the most commercial installs so should be the most stable, and CBus has the nicest switches but is "thin" in the US. Only have the Lutron price quote, so not sure if they are about the same price or not.

Any opinions on interfacing them with CQC on a Win2003 box? Reliability? Vendor support?

I realize that very few utilized more than one of these systems, so I'm just looking for opinions.

Thanks for the input.

Don

 

[FrankMc]

Hi Don

Theres a CQC Plugin for CBUS ....

Frank

 

[Herdfan]

and CBus has the nicest switches

They are very nice, but IMHO, they might "date" the house in 10 years or so. The Lutron or Litetouch keypads seem more timeless.

BTW, I love my Lutron system. I am just now getting to understand all of its capabilities.

 

[DJK]

and CBus has the nicest switches

They are very nice, but IMHO, they might "date" the house in 10 years or so. The Lutron or Litetouch keypads seem more timeless.

BTW, I love my Lutron system. I am just now getting to understand all of its capabilities.

Lutron seems like good system. I think that CQC plug ins for both Lutron and CBus give them an advantage over LiteTouch.

 

[AnotherOne]

I've had my litetouch system for 8 years now (250+ loads, 50+ keypads). I had one dimmer module go bad during that time which was fixed for free (I had to pay shipping to them) under their lifetime warrenty and 2 glitches that required me to power down the module (turn a circuit breaker on and off). Runs flawlessly. I have 3 serial ports (they now have ethernet), one goes to my Elk M1, one to my phast system (which is getting replaced soon), and one to my PC.

They are pretty good about updating their control software - updates about every 6 months and answer questions on their forum. On DIY friendlyness, I'd give them a "B", with ELK getting an "A+" and AMX getting a "D".

Their serial protocol is pretty easy to parse and all information is sent over the serial links, just like the M1. So you can get button presses, lighting changes, keypad led changes, notification events, query load state, etc.

 

[DJK]

I've had my litetouch system for 8 years now (250+ loads, 50+ keypads). I had one dimmer module go bad during that time which was fixed for free (I had to pay shipping to them) under their lifetime warrenty and 2 glitches that required me to power down the module (turn a circuit breaker on and off). Runs flawlessly. I have 3 serial ports (they now have ethernet), one goes to my Elk M1, one to my phast system (which is getting replaced soon), and one to my PC.

They are pretty good about updating their control software - updates about every 6 months and answer questions on their forum. On DIY friendlyness, I'd give them a "B", with ELK getting an "A+" and AMX getting a "D".

Their serial protocol is pretty easy to parse and all information is sent over the serial links, just like the M1. So you can get button presses, lighting changes, keypad led changes, notification events, query load state, etc.

Thanks for that information, very valuable input during my decision process. It seems that all three of these products do the job well, so that makes the selection that much harder.

 

[emillika]

I went with Clipsal/Cbus and so far I am happy with the system. We are looking forward to getting the cbus thermostats and wireless keypads in a few months. Integration with CQC will start once I have our remodeling done in a couple weeks.