GadgetBazza

I’d agree that the touchpad makes for a better experience in terms of quick startup and also available for all visitors, but they are slower to use that an iPad (if you ignore the startup time) and the fidelity of control of sliders on the touchscreens is rubbish by comparison. i have 7 touchscreens, 3 fixed and 4 portable, in 3 years I’ve had 4 failed units, only 2 of which were inside warranty, so I don’t expect to get much length of service from them. personally I wish there was a way I could overcome the need for the iOS app to reload the project data every time you switch to the app rather than maintain state, then I would replace all of my touchscreens with iPads as they fail. Only way I can think of is to not let the device sleep. From memory, the touchscreens are around £750, iPad starts at £329, other tablets cheaper still I suspect.

So my Jacuzzi is connected to the Wifi and not connected over cellular. It has the Prolink app, but this does require an annual subscription at £64.95 per year I believe. Reasons for integration are for power efficiency. I have a large solar setup here (26kW) and a lot of spare solar power during sunny days. I have a bunch of energy monitoring nodes and am just starting to use node-red to run workflows to change properties of certain power hungry devices that are not priority. I have a workflow running already which integrates with control4 that controls a pump running the pool pump via a relay switch. When there is excess solar the pool pump runs. I monitor the amount of run time during free solar hours, if the daily pump running time is not met, it runs the pumps for more time during the cheap rate night hours to make up the pump run time per day. For the hot tub, I would like control the temperature to govern the heater power usage using the same process. Rather than have to determine if I can reverse engineer the pro-link piece, if C4 was able to control the tub, I can use my existing integration code with C4 to adjust the tub temperature according to power availability. @South Africa C4 user you mention you have done this with a free driver? Can you confirm and please let me know the driver name? Do you have to maintain the ProLink subscription as well? Thanks Barry

Sorry to dig this up. the free driver that’s mentioned, does it require the Jacuzzi ProLink subscription to be maintained as well or does it talk to the spa direct?

Subscribing to this post as I've had two T3's go this way in the space of 2-3 months myself. First was sent for repair at C4 at a fixed cost of £260, they couldn't fix it and sent out a brand new replacement. That one was a wall mount using PoE, but I now have a 2nd gone the same way which is a wifi portable unit.

Ive had two T3's go this way in the last few months... In my examples, both T3's went through a 24-48 hour period of constantly crashing when completing boot up and restarting, before finally just getting stuck at the C4 icon / post screen. Dealer talked me through the reset pin process and I got a slightly different icon on screen (something like boot cannot load) and the dealer tried to re-flash the device remotely, but couldn't access it. They picked it up and tried to connect it to the system at their showroom, no joy. Next option was to send it to C4 for repair at a fixed cost of £260. They sent back a brand new unit as they couldn't fix it. As mentioned I now have another portable device gone exactly the same way on a system that's just over 2 years old. To be honest, the performance of T3 devices and the rip off price associated as well as the fact that I've already had two fail during warranty makes me think about looking at iPad with C4 app and no pass lock etc fitted in wall mounts or something... I wonder if anyone has done this and how it compares...

You're still avoiding my question! Also, that page was quite useful to see the status of the system and the touch panels, shame it's gone, I'm sure there was a more elegant solution than binning it.

Lots of electrical work going on requiring shutting down of the electricity supply. Not always required because of problems with the system. Not a fan of just pulling the plugs on computers. Besides, why should I have to wait for a dealer to be able to reboot a device if it's not behaving??? Any chance you can help with the question rather than redirecting?

Seems to be a bit of a drastic response. Would have been easy to come up with an alternate installation specific password. I've had a look around ComposerHE and can't see an option to reboot EA's. Anyone have any other options?

Bummer, what's the reasoning for that?! Any way for me to close down / reboot equipment gracefully now then?

Hi, Recently had an upgrade to latest OS3 version after a visit from my dealer (3.1.3 I think). Previously I used to be able to use a browser to connect to the IP address of my EA5 or EA1's and login using the non secret password where you can see the status of the controllers / touch screens etc. In particular, if I needed to shut down or reboot any of the EA's gracefully (eg for work on mains circuits) I could do this here, however since the upgrade, the EA's seem to only show a page regarding open source licenses being used by the EA units. Where's the old status / reboot page gone? Thanks Barry

Im not sure on the Infratech specs, but if there are two circuits (high and lo), then there will need to be 2 feeds, each providing half the power of the unit, so 4000W unit, two feeds of 2000W. I have a 6kW unit (not infra tech but another brand) which utilises two circuits at 3kW each, roughly 13Amp. We have these controlled by a C4 8 channel 16Amp relay. There are 4 inputs that can be wired on the unit, each with 2 outputs (that's the 8 way), each input can handle up to 16Amps across the two outputs related to it. So we wired, one 3kW heater feed to one of the first pair, and the second 3kW to the second pair, leaving roughly 3Amps of capacity on each of those pairs, so we have put low power lighting on each of the other two circuits to make use of the extra switching capacity if that makes sense. So basically as long as your load requirement doesn't exceed 16Amp, you should be able to use the C4 8 channel relay unit (non dimming version)? I wouldn't however recommend loading them at max current, particularly if there is an in-rush of current when the devices are switched on. I had a lighting puck rated for 400W which kept blowing with a 300W load of fluorescent lamps.

Thanks all, helpful responses. The ramp / led piece I guess is the obvious difference and possible snappy operation. I like the idea of consistency across different locations. we primarily have the switches in the bedrooms, but one also in the hallway by the front door which operates the garage doors, gates, house off and we all struggle to remember which is which already! i need to sit and think through what we need. thanks also for the tip on removing a binding by using the layout option.

Composer HE used here... So I’m still fiddling with the purposes of each of my buttons on my C4 Physical lighting switches. for buttons that don’t have anything assigned I can add programming in HE to do what I want. However if I want to unassign a button that turns a light on currently, there doesn’t appear to be anything I can see or do to achieve this. is this what is referred to as binding and only possible in Pro? if so, would it make sense to ask my dealer to remove all the light switch bindings and replace them with programming so that I can re -assign when I want to via programming or is this bad practice for some reason?

Hot water already covered. Ground source heated (electric) driven by 25kW of solar panels.... The matrix is using 3.6kWh a day unmanaged... or 25.2kWh a week, 109.2kWh a month. At Uk rates of 15p per kWh (and rising), it costs 55p a day, £3.78 per week or £16.38 per month, roughly £200 per year. The rest of the full rack uses 500w, there’s little I can do about this without sacrificing function, but the matrix is inefficient and idle. Home Automation (or building control systems) were always supposed to be as much about economy as well as convenience.

Just a heads up. Our Texecom Elite 168 panel had to be downgraded to a Texecom Elite 88 panel before the C4 integration stabilised. Not sure if anyone else has successfully got a 168 working?