Where we’re at – at the moment.

When I was planning the Home Automation project, I have to admit to I was a little Gung-ho wanting to automate everything in one hit, the reality though is that you can’t just do that, you can build a base infra-structure which has to be right, then you can add the functionality when the time is right.

When is the right time?

Well in my case, there were two hurdles to overcome, the first being that the products I want / need just aren’t available, Loxone does a pretty good job with new product releases, but invariably they are too slow for me (am definitely part of the want it now at all costs generation!)

The second challenge is the team you are working with, its very hard to get people to change their working practices, and this is the biggie, this home automation stuff is a big change, logic rules that previously applied are thrown out of the window, we’ve had a few issues, where the only course of action was to call the support guys at Loxone to confirm what needed to be done.

We’ve ticked quite a few of the boxes for our requirements:

Power Monitoring
Lighting Control
Remote Audio
House Alarm

Next addition is to remove the Hive heating controller and letting the mini-server manage all the heating. Theres a ton of other heating work that needs to be done at the same time, and i’m still waiting on the mythical magical Loxone Air TRV’s for the radiators to be released for full zoning of the house.

I have to admit to being slightly wary of letting the mini-server manage heating, as if it goes horribly wrong, it will increase our heating costs, and it’ll take a while to work out its gone wrong! I think some close work with Loxone tech support is in my near future.