Garden Lighting Courtesy Of Loxone….

Our latest project on the house has been to make the garden usable throughout the year. The ground is incredibly boggy, due to the fact theres about 50cm’s of earth on top of solid clay. Once the heavens open up for a few days the grass has been disappearing under water.

Our solution was to remove the grass altogether and gravel the garden, thus raising the height of the ground by another 6cm’s probably just enough to to hide the fact there’s water there. To hold the gravel in place we ordered 40 square metres of Ecodeck it can be used for drives or shed bases and is made from recycled materials so its green credentials are good I am assuming.

3 days and two and a half ton’s of gravel and the garden is now looking so much better.

Most importantly though, once the decking had been installed was the lighting and power. We only ran a single power line between the house and the shed, my plan to rely was to rely on the Loxone Nano IO Air units, although to be honest it was one of those “Will it wont it work?” installations. My experiences with wireless kit over the years have made me deeply doubtful as to whether wireless really works.

Our garden is only 30ft, but in between the Nano IO’s and the shed are a supporting wall, and an external wall, plus all manner of other wireless devices to create havoc for the signal. Luckily the doubts about Air range were unfounded, and we get 4-5 bars of signal when interogating the devices from the Loxone config application.

So what did we use? well 2 Nano IO air modules, and seemingly 10 tons of wire and containment to “make things safe” according to the electrician. Seriously though, the Nano IO’s are designed to sit behind fairly deep standard sized wallboxes, our biggest issue was mounting the devices. We ended up with them in a small waterproof distribution box with DIN rail, the choice of either velcro sticky back tape or cable ties was to use the cable ties as they appeared a little more secure. Perhaps Loxone could create a Din rail mount?

We have 3 lighting circuits controlled by the Nano IO’s with a 4th circuit free for “future expansion” I did briefly consider buying a single Air Extension, but taking into account i’d probably not ever use all the inputs and outputs and the fact it was £150 more than a pair of Nano IR’s there seemed little point.

For now there are no physical switches in the shed, i’ve not quite got round to fitting any, but am wondering if they we truly need the, both the wife and myself very rarely have no access to our phones or Ipad’s, so there is no rush. For some reason however it just seems wrong to leave 12 inputs unused!

The finished article (for now)