Best approach to HA for lighting control

[James Reed <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi

I'm in the middle of buying a house, which is a largish Victorian
terrace. It needs a lot of work but we are going to have to do it in
stages because we can't afford a full scale renovation in one go - and
anyway we have to live in it!

I'd love to embed some HA really to do lighting control to begin with
although I'd like to extend it to other things in due course. I've got
some Homeeasy products at the moment, and although I found the switched
sockets good the lighting modules / dimmers have been unreliable and I'm
not really satisfied with it as a permanent / long term solution. Also I
hear that lightwaverf has similar issues and it does not seem to be well
supported either.

I've looked at things like c-bus wireless which looks much better but is
expensive. Ideally I would like to use a wired solution with cat5
everywhere, and this may prove possible but it would have to be done
room by room.

If I was going to use c-bus could I do it on a piecemeal basis or would
it need to be done in one go? ALso do I need a specialist installer or
could it be done diy or with help from a general electrician? Are there
any other systems I should consider? I don't have much budget for this
so would prefer to be cheaper if poss but I'm aware that you get what
you pay for and I've not found HE that good even though it was cheap.

I'd be grateful for any thoughts

James



------------------------------------

<*> Join the Automated Home Forums
http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/vbulletin/