this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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Honestly considering going to DC lighting after my solar conversion completes at my house for this reason
I have some dc lighting in my basement. It's great, but there aren't as many options out there and electricians don't want to touch it.
I was looking at rv lighting as some options over wise just doing custom jobs (LEDs in whatever fixtures I think look nice). It helps like domes, reccesed, and ambiant lighting I think.
Oh yeah electricians are allergic to DC lol (I used to be one, and yeah that was big knowledge gap in codes, breakers, etc).
Electricians don't want to touch DC circuits because it is illegal to mix low voltage DC and high voltage AC circuits. At least it's illegal in Europe. You need to rebuild your walls to ensure separate and independent wiring channels. And that's a very expensive nightmare.
It's a lot cheaper to buy Philips bulbs instead.
Yeah, I definitely get it. It would be illegal to mix low and line voltage in the USA, too.
I ended up running the cabling myself, all class two circuits powering 12 24vdc spots. The nice bit is that they are all addressable RGBW spots, so I can control them all individually or as groups. And it's all automated. The downside is that I'll probably have to remove them if we ever sell this house, because nobody but me understands how it works.
The thing is that it is a lot easier and a lot safer to buy some ESP32 boards, flash them with WLED, plug into 5V/12V/24V box, hide all of that in a 3D printed enclosure and call it a day than to rebuild the bloody walls (: And you won't be breaking any regulations and every sparky will be fine with that.
Running all your house with two wiring systems is dumb AF that's why no one will ever do that for you. That's my point.
I used to work for a European home automation company. Thing is, their gear is most cost effective in new construction and was very popular in Germany, Austria, Czechia, and Poland, but convincing anyone to wire for low voltage devices in the UK or US was like asking for ketchup on pancakes. There are a lot of reasons to like their tech, but they don't really do retrofit, so it hasn'tanaged to make a dent in the market.