Bang!

I’ve never thought the Loxone Air Socket was one of the most attractive pieces of kit that Loxone sell, so the suggestions made a few years back when I was talking with Omid at Loxone was to mount the innards in a back box to control a pair of normal power sockets. Obviously stripping the kit down means the warranty goes down the drain, I wasn’t too worried about that just how safe it would be, my sparky wired it all in and ensured it was safely insulated in its own plastic back box.

For the past 2 years i’ve had my Xbox One plugged into those sockets, along with an amp and a TV, and its worked flawlessly, even if the downside was the missus could see when i’d been gaming, it was also quite interesting to see how much power the console consumed even when it was “Off”, not much but generally between 25-40 watts. All these things add up so integrating the relay into the goodnight button for the house powered the devices down for the night.

On a Friday lunchtime a couple of weeks ago, I fancied a bit of sneaky gaming to kill a couple of hours, so the phone was set to divert to voicemail, I got comfy in my gaming chair, turned on the relay, and Bang! no Xbox, no TV, no Amp, I thought i’d tripped a circuit, so I toddled off down the fuseboard, turned everything back on, thinking lets get gaming. Sadly this wasn’t to be. I tried the relay control on the app, with no effect, then decided it was time to fire up Loxone Config to see if I could see the Air socket, I already knew it was a lost cause, Loxone config found nothing, so I powered down the ring main, removed the cover and here’s what I found :

‘it’s not pinin’! ‘It’s passed on! This socket is no more! It has ceased to be! ‘It’s expired and gone to meet ‘its maker!

Well its actually with Loxone at the moment trying to work out what went wrong with it. Will report back if/when I get more information.