Did I say finally? I lied
Originally Posted by
eddr
Also, I have noticed in our soon to be house that theres a light downstairs by the front door, and a light at the top of the stairs. The light at the top of the stairs has a dimmer switch at the top of the stairs, but downstairs has a normal switch which is a double (one switch turns the light by the front door on and off, the other the light at the top). How would I go about changing the light at the top of the stairs to be Idratek controlled whilst also having the light at the bottom also controlled?
We were having so much fun discussing SRHs and DRHs I don't think the lighting question got answered.
So I'm guessing that the dimmer controlled light is wired to be "2-way" controlled, that is, you can turn it on and off both at the switch at the bottom and at the dimmer at the top (probably by depressing the dimmer knob).
The first thing is to understand how 2-way light switches work (time for a bit of ASCII art):
Code:
o---------------------o
Live -------o o--------- BULB ------- Neutral
\ o---------------------o/
SW1 SW2
With two way switching both switches are two-way and there are actually two current paths to the bulb (top and bottom in the diagram - usually in a 3core+earth cable). If both switches are up, or both switches are down, current will flow, bulb on etc. If switches are differnt, current can't flow, bulb stays off.
With IDRATEK control, you don't need this, a single relay unit switches power to the bulb and multiway switching is done by communications over the control wiring as configured by Cortex. This can be done with Reflex as well, so your fallbacks can continue to operate as multiway. This makes multiway switching much easier to wire for, since you don't need the mains wiring between all switch positions.
Therefore, you could replace the top switch with an SLD dimmer module and the bottom switch with a DRB. Only one relay of the DRB is used, to switch power to the bottom light. The second button on the DRB can be configured to toggle the light connected to the dimmer by controlling the dimmer. The SLD buttons can be configured to control the dim level in up/down fashion, or, in fact, can be reassigned to do something else. So you could have one button cycle dim level up and down and use the other button to do 2-way switching to the downstairs light.
Since you are a retrofit, you would need to check where the wiring for the 2 way actually goes, since the load and live feed can be at either end. At worst youd need to use the existing 2-way cable between positions to carry the live to the dimmer ie a terminal block in the back box to join stuff up.
Of course, the whole delight of having properly automated lighting is that you don't need to touch the light switches much...