It's getting close to first fix for me and although I thought I had a clear idea of where all my bricks, dimmers and servers were going I'm starting to think again.

My original plan was to have them all in the same place in a 'sort of' cellar area that I will have (sort of being that it's only 0.5M high).

I have a 50x30 tunnel that has been made from top (loft) to the cellar which all the cables can run through.

My cause for reflection is that I am wondering if having all the dimmer blocks pretty far away from the lights is actually a good idea. I would have thought that the dimmer blocks should be relatively close to the bulbs due to dc voltage drop and if the dimmers are in the cellar we are talking up to 10M away from some lights.

If I do localise my dimmers, then should I place a brick with them? Things then snowball from being central to distributed and I'm not sure that's such a good idea,

Suggestions / help / please :)

Ian

 How much of your lighting is DC?

I have:

GND floor 7 dimmable areas(over 5 rooms);  11 non dimmable areas
1st floor:5 dimmable areas (over 5 rooms), 5 non dimmable areas
loft area: that needs 2 dimmable areas (1 room); 1 non dimmable

I also have a splattering of 5A light sockets that are going in.

I have the mode SP-06-08 8 channel DMX dimmer, so I was hoping to use that one to either control all on the gnd floor or the 1st floor and loft areas.

That got me thinking to just place this unit in the loft area with a single brick to take some of the wiring trails away from the masses that will end up in the cellar?

 In your original post, it said you were worried about the dc drop over long disntances, but by the sounds of it, most of your lighting is AC. Having everything centralised wouldn't really have any problems in this case.

I was a little confused I think. most of the lighting will be 12vDC mr16.

I was thinking that the ac->dc conversion happens near the brick, whereas I now understand that the dimmers are mains->mains and it will be the local (to the mr16's) transformers that will do the final coversion.

The added confusion was when I tried to look for mr16 LEDs and only found ones that cannot be dimmed so at the moment all my dimmable units are non-LEDs.
Unless someone can point me at some reasonably priced dimmable LED units?

In terms of siting, its best to have the consumer unit at the top, followed by the dimmer packs followed by the WebBrick and then the patching.

In this way you keep the PELV furthest from the mains.

Keep in mine your colour schemes as well and remember to mark the outside of the enclosure with a note to say both mains and PELV are present.

Regards

Andy
 

PELV - protected extra low voltage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_low_voltage