Hi,

 I looking for some advice in creating my scenes and schedules. Are there any common / successful patterns I can apply to implementing these ? They need to control heating and lighting based on inputs, both switch and temperature ?

 Thanks,

 Paul

Scenes:

The general rule seems to be to use two buttons. The top one moves you up the scenes and the bottom one is off. 

The first scene tends to be a dim one. This works well for me in the bathroom as I tend to only need to push it once as the LED compliments it and makes it bright enough (but not quite enough to see how to put the seat down in a safe manor). In the bedroom is more of a pain as I need to push it twice to get the light level I use most and I hate having to push things more than I need to so I think that I will be changing that.

Schedules:

Heat and water in the morning, same in the evening. I don't really have a big enough place to worry about it more than that. We are playing with a different way of interacting with Hot Water; just turning it on and off rather than changing the thresholds; and that's the royal we.
 

Paul

   First off, its pretty rare to to the schedules in a WebBrick.  They are there for stuff like green houses, i.e. applications that always run.  Schedules are more commonly part of the global intelligence of a home and therefore implemented by the Gateway.  That said, fair enough because we don't say much about the Gateway on the forum - but we will !

 
 In terms of scenes, it helps to think about the type of switches you'll be using.  If they have mimics, then reserve two of the digital outputs for these.  6-7 are TTL outs and therefore not so commonly used and thus make the best choice.

 A single WebBrick has enough capacity for one major and one minor room and scenes can be in two banks [0-7] [8-11]  Use the first bank for the major room and the second for the minor room.

Here is an example of a scene configuration.
 

 Paul

   Me back, going on to answer your 'temperature' section.

You can consider the WebBrick as able to look after a local 'control loop' for you.  For example if you have a underfloor actuator that lets warm water into an underfloor heating system.

 
You can configure the WebBrick to control that actuator on a temperature basis.

Note that you can use the 'Actions' of a digital input to adjust the thresholds. 

You'll see that we use a Dwell here to ensure that the boiler runs for at least its minimum run time.  This is important because some boiler types (in particular Oil fired boilers) can be damaged by short cycles. 

Consider the example below:

Thanks - I certainly expect to use the Gateway for the more co-ordinative efforts. Can the Gateway manage scenes and effect sequences through conditionals or other mechanisms, and in effect allow a individual brick to manage more that two zones ?

E.g on the second floor I have a bedroom (2 dimmer circuits), an En-suite (1 circuit) and a study (1 circuit), so from a capacity perspective, enough for 1 brick and dimming unit, but 3 zones. Could I use scenes on the brick for, say, the bedroom (0-7) and en-suite (8-11) and a 'remote' scene manager on the Gateway for the Study ?

 Paul

Paul

 Yes you can manage a whole variety of conditionals, we use the term compound, you cn find the documentation at:

http://docs.webbrick.co.uk/eventinterfaces/WbEvCompound.html

Regards

Andy