Been having a spot of bother with my plans for lightwaverf lighting in my hallway, the two way lighting has been trickier than I thought. For background, by two way lighting I mean the traditional hallway setup where you have two switches on each floor, to control each hallway, so you can turn on the upstairs light from downstairs, and possibly vice versa. Ours is a little more complex as we have three floors. I fitted one lightwaverf double dimmer downstairs, and left the normal old style click switches on the other floors. This doesn't work with two way lighting, as each dimmer requires power to it all the time, it's not just a dumb switch. So, I thought about it through the week and had planned it out, with only the kit I already have (can't be buying more hardware in January before pay day). Keep the double dimmer downstairs, move one of my single dimmers to the top floor, and then "hard wire" the switches on the middle floor, use a chocolate block to have them permanently on, and then stick a lightwaverf master switch over the top. These master switches are great, they require no wiring but fit into the place of a normal switch, and then use the rf remote control to operate any of your other switches. So perfect, full control of all floors, and some bonus "mood" buttons thrown in. The hitch came when I removed the switch for upstairs, for some reason it's been put into the only solid wall in the whole house, and the depth of the box behind the switch is very mean - it's a metal plaster box, rather than the plastic dry liner type, so it's not deep enough to put the new switch in. So, still no controlling the hallway light on the middle floor from the middle floor, and back to the drawing board.
I put the master switch back in where I originally planned to, by the front door. This has the advantage that a) I can use it to just control the lights in the entrance hallway, and b) with one click I can turn off every light and device that I want to as we walk out of the door.
I also fitted another remote socket today, behind the TV. It's a double, going to leave one switch permanently on and not linked to any remote, which the Sky plus will be connected to, and the other one is going to be linked only to the raspberry pi so I can set timers on it. This way I can have a calendar event that turns it off overnight every night. I think this might save some energy as it means the transmitter for the tv sender, the amp, surround sound, consoles etc won't accidentally be left on stand by over night.
It's far to late for me to apologise for being a bore about this stuff isn't it?
raspberry pi: Credit card sized super cheap computer, awesome.
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in Hythe in the far South. Married to Clare and father to two, I'm a full stack web engineer, and I do js / Node, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubbing, parkrun, eating, home-automation + other diy jiggery-pokery, history, tree stuff, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.