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Hi all

New to these forums ... I have no electrical experience, my brother-in-law is a qualified electrician who kindly does most work we need for us.

As I imagine will be only too well known to a lot of you though, as someone with no electrical experience I have ideas as to what I'd like to deploy, but having trouble working out if it's possible. My brother-in-law helps me out a lot but I appreciate that not everyone's expert in all fields and some of my queries are probably the equivalent of someone assuming that I'm knowledgable about phones, printers and scanners just because I work in IT ...

Being new to this I'm not sure about etiquette ... should I list my query here given the first post, or in the proper forum for it ... ?

Thanks in advance :)
 
you can post here in this section. if appropriate, mods can move it to another section . go ahead with your query. and welcometo the asylum of electrickery.
 
Welcome to the asylum mate

@Tel. I have the copyright for "Welcome to the asylum".... It's mine. Just cause you miss a space out doesn't mean you can use it whenever you want... I require payment... With cheesecake..
 
Thanks both, much appreciated and pleasure to meet you :thumbsup:

We're renovating a bungalow before we move in. I'd like to put in plinth LEDs, which I know is simple enough.

However ... we have two runs of kitchen units; on one side of the kitchen we have two corner base units with a 600mm oven housing and a 500mm drawer pack between them. The fridge-freezer then goes next to the base unit at the far end, and there's another corner base unit on the other side of it and then a 600mm base unit holding the sink. So I'm thinking I'll either need to have two sets of LEDs running off a junction box, or one set that can run about fifteen plinth LEDs in series with an extension somewhere in the middle.

Here's where it gets odd though: what I'd like to have is a small occupancy detector in the plinth on the outside of one of the corner base units which will detect movement and switch on the plinth LEDs when the lux levels are low. Idea being that if you go into the kitchen for water or something in the middle of the night, the low-level lights will come on without dazzling you or you having to fumble about for the light switch.

The extra wrinkle though is that I'd also like the option to be able to override the occupancy detector and switch the plinth LEDs on manually when we want to. I realise that this whole scenario probably would've been easier with a ceiling-mounted detector from CP Electronics or similar (we're doing something similar in the bathroom but running solely off the occupancy detector with no additional option to switch manually) but unfortunately I came up with this bright idea after I'd already done all the chasing in the kitchen walls and we'd done the painting <facepalm>

My brother-in-law mentioned that I'd either need something (I'm assuming he's talking the occupancy detector here) that has a dedicated override option or a permanent live and a switched live. I asked National Lighting and they recommended the Saxby Ikon Pro CCT lighting system but they don't have much in the way of technical documentation, Saxby declined to return my email seeking their opinion and I'm guessing that if it does work, the dedicated in-line occupancy detector for that set will switch on one set of LEDs but not the other ...

So: that's my challenge ;) Has anyone here managed to do anything similar and if so, are you able to point me at what you used, please ... ?

Thank you in advance for any and all advice :)
 
I should mention that my brother-in-law has allowed for a cable to connect up the plinth LEDs (I think it's standard two-core) and suggested I run a three-core cable in case we can sort the occupancy detector, which I've done. Both feed back to a twelve-gang back-box with other cabling which will have a 3 x 4 grid switch setup, IIRC. With a standard transformer on the Ikon Pro set rather than a transformer / driver for feeding into the mains, I don't know if that set's even appropriate ...
 
.
Welcome to the asylum mate

@Tel. I have the copyright for "Welcome to the asylum".... It's mine. Just cause you miss a space out doesn't mean you can use it whenever you want... I require payment... With cheesecake..
think it's time you were assimilated. resistance is futile, gimme that cheesecake, it's wasted on you.:D:D:D.
 
so you're asking for a recommendation of an occupancy sensor - right?

I believe so, yes. If I've understood correctly that it's the occupancy sensor that would need the dedicated override function or switched live + permanent live, and assuming you can get generic examples that can be used with other plinth LED deployments, then that would probably work best and give us a lot more flexibility in what we do with the LEDs themselves
 
Some CP PIRs come with a variable lux level.
I don’t know whether they do one that could be sited anywhere other than in ceiling though?
Thanks spinlondon; that was the problem, the CP stuff looks good but unfortunately it would be major work to put a ceiling-mounted detector now. I know that Ikon set has a built-in PIR with lux detection which could be let into the plinth and there are other types too, so I wondered if there were any other options available (or if someone had achieved something similar and could share what they did) but would still let me override it and switch them on fully when we wanted to ...
 
On most PIRs, you have 3 terminals.
Permanent Live, Neutral and Switched Live.
To bypass the PIR, you just take a feed from the Permanent Live terminal on the PIR, down to a light switch, and then from the light switch back up to the Switched Live terminal on the PIR.
The PIR will still detect people and switch on and off, but if the light switch is switched to on, the PIR switching will have no effect.
However, if the PIR has switched to on, and you turn the light switch off, the lights will stay on, until the PIR timer runs out.
 
On most PIRs, you have 3 terminals.
Permanent Live, Neutral and Switched Live.
To bypass the PIR, you just take a feed from the Permanent Live terminal on the PIR, down to a light switch, and then from the light switch back up to the Switched Live terminal on the PIR.
The PIR will still detect people and switch on and off, but if the light switch is switched to on, the PIR switching will have no effect.
However, if the PIR has switched to on, and you turn the light switch off, the lights will stay on, until the PIR timer runs out.
Thanks spinlondon ... forgive me for being thick, but can I assume the Sycamore SY7262A wouldn’t do it? This tech diagram seems to show a switched 240v in and a standard 240v out, but nothing else ...
 
That looks like it might be switching both the Line and the Neutral, though it may only be switching the Line.
If it is only switching the line, then you could still bypass it as I said in the other post.
If it switches both Line and Neutral, you could link across the neutral terminals and switch the Line.
Another option would be to switch both the line and Neutral using a double pole switch in place of a standard light switch.
 
Hi all ... I acknowledge it's been a long time but for any who might be interested, we managed to get this to work with the equivalent of the Sycamore unit, a Luxomat PD91CFC. Admittedly the lux is a little sensitive and flips the plinth lights on late afternoon rather than just at night, but I think we can live with that. The only odd thing (to my mind at least) is that the LEDs pulse once every ten seconds when not overridden and not powered on by the occupancy detector. Not sure if that's an expected thing or not, will likely see if Luxomat can confirm if this is by design or not

Hopefully if anyone else has this dodgy idea, this might help out in narrowing down the choices a bit!
 

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