UPB
I am working on the electrical design for our new house, and I need to make some decisions as it relates to the light switches. There are about 150 total light switches, and as with my current house I want them to be integrated into the home automation.
In my current house the light switches are UBP based switches, which use the power bus to do data transfer. (Similar to X10 )They are integratabtle into the OmniPro HA setup, and can be programmed for switch/load independence.
The features of the Simply Automated UPB switches are great, but there are some interesting problems with UPB. It is sensitive to noise on the power line from things like UPS and Plasma TVs. You can install isolators for those devices, but it takes some time to figure out which devices is cause problem.
The alternative is a switch that does either Z-wave or Zigbee. Z-wave is a 908mhz wireless mesh network, so the switches only need to reach the next nearest switch. Zigbee use 2.4GHz, so it tends to have a bit more interference with other 2.4GHz devices.
Any thoughts from my other HA friends?
