Idratek Smart Home Installation Blog

Idratek is still a little known brand in the Smart Home industry, but it has an impressive array of hardware modules and software features. The aesthetics and form of the modules have always been controversial, but there’s no doubting the Idratek networks functionality.

UK home automator, David Gumbrell, is blogging his Idratek installation and it’s a great insight into what the system is capable of. With lots of photos and screen grabs it’s a great home automation diary.

“The combination of door sensors and PIR make for accurate and fast presence detection. If the door is already open the lights come on in about 1m of travel. If the door was closed it’s effectively instantaneous.

Temperature and humidity are also just for interest at the moment. The room has been cabled to allow radiator valve control to be added later – once all rooms and the boiler have been cabled, since I only want to have to drain the central heating once. I guess in theory that individual room temp readouts might help with radiator balancing if you didn’t want to go the whole hog with radiator valves.

Here’s the whole set-up. The two Hager CUs were previously installed to allow all lighting to be star-wired, the original intent was to use DIN mounting X-10 modules. So this was done before UKHA2003, when I discovered Idratek.

I still intend to use the CUs, currently most circuits are connected up in “normal” fashion using DIN-rail terminal blocks, but I do have 2 LD11s for room dimming and a couple more in boxes waiting. Idratek have DIN-mounting relay blocks, which I will be trying out shortly, but currently no DIN-rail dimmer. I fully expect that to be rectified. In the meantime, the LD11s can be integrated into the Idratek system via the X10 gateway, so I use those.

Underneath the CUs is Node-I proper. This consists of the patchbay and gateway sections. The patchbay is made from 4 Idratek patch modules (6WA001) removed from their faceplates and reverse-mounted into surface mounting twin pattress boxes. The 4 patchboards each provide 6 connections, and given the capability of the modular connector to join multiple cables, and the arbitrary Idranet cabling topology, I fully expect this to be sufficient. The use of 4 sections matches the 4 outputs of the MPD-001 mini power module, and also the segmentation in the battery backed IPS-001 intelligent power supply. I’ve left a gap to allow an upgrade from MPD-001 to IPS-001 later.”

Read David’s on-going Idratek install blog here – www.gumbrell.com/archives/home_automation

Visit the Idratek website here – idratek.com

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