When I bought my house the wiring was a mess and, in some cases, dangerous!
The most serious issues were:
no earthing anywhere,
'lighting' grade wiring to all the kitchen sockets, and
bare wires in the front garden and in the loft.
The secondary issues were:
that there was only one light switch in the hall by the front door even though there are five doors along the length of the hall,
there was only one light switch in the kitchen even though there are three entrances to the kitchen
all the existing light switches were behind the doors when they were opened, and
there was lots of redundant wiring throughout the house and in the garden.
The lights in the front garden were also operated from an old immersion heater switch outside the bathroom
(that took us a while to work out!
)
As a result of all the problems I could have had the house rewired traditionally and had the walls of the kitchen and hall channelled out to put in extra switches. However that would have resulted in a lot of additional work to redecorate afterwards. Instead I chose the smart home route. It was slightly more expensive but saved on all the hacking about and redecorating.
I had an electrician do most of it for me. Initially, he traced all the problems and disconnected the dangerous and redundant wiring. He removed some of it and left me to do the rest - I was finding old wiring buried the front garden for months!
The creation of the smart home as been done in stages - the Loxone system is modular so you can add to it over time.
First he installed the server in a cabinet in the loft. Luckily all the original wiring inside the house was in conduits hidden behind the walls and, as it's a bungalow, much of the rest is accessible from the loft. The existing wiring from the lights was connected to the server. New 24v wiring was run from the server and pulled through the existing conduits down to the switches. Most of the light switches were swapped out for single, double or triple retractive ones. The back boxes are the same size as the originals so didn't require any further changes. Effectively the 'switches' are now in the server with the wall switches acting as 'senders' to provide information to the server so it knows what to do when they are pressed (to provide multiple functions via one button).
After that, he added the motion, light, heat and smoke sensors in the hall and kitchen and connected them to the server. Again, being a bungalow, that was relatively straightforward to attach them to the ceilings and run the cabling in the loft.
The server was then hardwired to my wi-fi router and he programmed it from there and then showed me how to modify all the settings and add new functionality.
The second stage was a minor one. The electrician ran traditional wiring into the back garden to the shed and to provide various waterproof sockets so I could use the lawnmower, leaf blower etc. without running long cables back to the house. It also meant I could have power to the BBQ area. Having power by the BBQ area has meant I can use the Sonos speakers there too. I added a water feature and low-voltage lighting and the electrician installed another wirelessly controlled socket system to control them via the server. Because of the size of the garden he had to install a booster transmitter/receiver in the loft.
The third stage was adding the heating into the system. Initially, he just connected the old boiler to the server so it could control the timing of the heating and basically replace the existing timer on the boiler. But when I had the boiler replaced we did it properly. We added the wireless room sensors which just needed to be screwed to a wall in each room. They are discreet little boxes about 4 or 5 cm square and possibly 1 cm deep. All the thermostatically controlled valves (TRVs) on the radiators were replaced with wireless actuators. This was simply a case of unscrewing the TRVs and screwing on the wireless actuators.
The server was then reprogrammed to recognise the room sensors and the wireless actuators and to add a heating schedule. Just to add, the heating has so many permutations. Each room has three levels of heating (as well as 'off'). You can set up multiple schedules as far as timing is concerned so I have a basic weekly schedule with the heating coming on in different rooms at different times on different days but also schedules for when I have guests or when I'm away.
The final stage was to add the extractors in the bathroom and kitchen. The vents were cut into the ceilings with the actual fans installed in the loft space (it's much quieter than having them just above the vents). The sensors were already in place from when the heating was done so it was just a case of updating the programming of the server to add the extra functionality.
I think that's more or less it.
It does have some odd little functions too. For instance, if I'm away I can get it to switch lights on or off following a similar pattern to the way they would be switched had I been there. I've never tried it but I suspect this would mean the lights would come on in the loo at random intervals roughly matching my normal visits.
