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Saving a Fail-Safe Motorized Valve
Even “fail-safe” components have an expiration date. After eight years of flawless service, a critical motorized valve in my setup failed to close. This post dives into the internal “magic” of supercapacitors and gearboxes, why a secondary safety layer (and Loxone) saved my wallet, and a step-by-step guide to upgrading your valves with a €3 replacement part.
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Motion sensors for Loxone
PIR sensors suitable for 24VDC Quite often I have been asked for any recommendations for motion sensors that could be used in SmartHome installations. Obviously, there is a wide range of products on the market these days, however there are two important attributes people mostly care about. Motion sensor must be totally silent I am Read more
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Soil moisture sensor
Measuring soil humidity to control the garden irrigation I have ordered Vegetronix VH400 – Moisture Sensor Probe. This is very interesting device. It is amazing in particular by the speed of measurement and immediate reaction to the moisture level change. Its power consumption is less than 13mA. However, the supply voltage has to be between 3.5V and 20 VDC which in Read more
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Garden irrigation system and Loxone
If you want to treat your garden really seriously, automated irrigation system is a must have for you. Yes of course, there are possibilities to align your planting selection to the local conditions, but to get really the most of your garden, you may want to have nice lawn, some fruit bushes/trees and possibly some Read more
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Terminal blocks
Once you have all the wiring done properly following the star typology, you might notice that the amount of cables terminating in the cabinet is enormous. I do have around 60 UTP/STP cables for the whole house there just for Loxone purposes (not talking about network cables that are heading into different rack. To keep Read more
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Push-buttons with LED illumination
I mentioned in other posts as well, that switches we have selected for our house were Schneider/Unica. We had quite good experience with these in our previous apartment where we have renovated the electricity from scratch. The only component to avoid are the electronic dimmers, which are prone to failure after a couple of months Read more
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Loxone and UPS
One of the typical questions that people ask me when talking about the smarthome installation is “What happens in case of power outage?”, trying to target some weak spots of the solution. Well, usually the simplest answer is that in the event of power loss all happens the same as with any conventional “dumb” home Read more