I’m planning for my motorhome / RV / camper, whatever you’ll call it.
Thing is, I’m so spoiled by openHAB and my smarthome, that I’d like that comfort and luxury in my motorhome also.
But - Energy is not (yet!) abundant so I’m thinking of using Enocean. I never used it so I’m asking bluntly - I understand, that the sensor mostly work without additional Energy (e.g. switches work with the kinetic energy of pressing the switch or whatever). If I understand correctly for switching Lights I’d need:
is this correct? the low voltage relay receiver above uses 250mA, which is not sooo much, but still uses about 6 Ah per day as it is always on. But it offers 8 relays, which means I could use 8 lights?
That’s lot actually, in the league where you’d have a flat battery if parked up for a week.
I would guess that’s worst case with all relays ON though, and the idle current should be a lot less.
I’d put a hardware switch before the relais, so it won’t be using power of we’re not in the van. But yeah it says (max 250 mA).
Still, as I know nothing about enocean, would this be the way? The relay and the switches? Or do I need something else?
Well, it’s one way.
The Enocean self-powered switches is a great idea for adding controls avoiding long wiring runs and so on. In a motorhome they’d have some uses - for example in an awning where you wouldn’t have to run wires back to the van.
But bearing a mind a simple wired switch uses no energy, they’e not going to save the planet.
A motorhome is not like a building however. Wiring runs are short, ‘idling’ energy consumption is important (as you already realized), and the electrical environment is bit different - unstabilized power supply and wireless interference/blocking. Even the neighbours might be closer, and who knows what they might use!
Personally - and it is a very personal decision, depending on what you are comfortable doing and what’s actually available/affordable to you - I’d be looking to some kind of wired system, either bus based or centrally controlled (taking advantage of that short wiring run). OpenHAB allows to add some wireless stuff as well, without relying on it. Remote control, say.
Decision likely affected by whether you want dimming (I would, for some) or only on/off capability.
That didn’t help did it No “do this” answers here. Hope others will chime in with ideas.
Isn’t enocean encrypted in a way? ok, that would be a dealbreaker then.
I can make enough room for all the wiring (and yes, my interior is 4m long with the sleeping area in the back and it would be nice to have a “all power off”-Button without having to cross-wire everything…) but some kind of low-power low-consumtion based actuator based technology would be nice. I’m afraid most one use high-power not-so-low-consumption based technology - except proprietary ones like electroblocs….
I was thinking more about interference by dissimilar systems/devices, especially if you or the neighbouring motorhome are in a foreign country where radio allocations may be different. Rare, but worth considering.
The zero-consumption way of controlling lights is regular wallswitches. Bt that’s difficult to integrate with an automation system.
More complicated, but still zero-consumption, might be to use latching relays. These stay on or off, under the control of pushbuttons. Depending on the relay type, there might be separate push-on, push-off buttons, or just one push-toggle button.
The beauty of that is you can have several pushbuttons controlling the same relay. And one of those pushbuttons could be simulated by an OpenHAB controlled output.
It’s just a suggestion, but gives a way to work with or without OH. I guess you’d base an OH install on a Pi with some kind of GPIO extension. I’d definitely have inputs that could monitor the actual light states, and so detect when manually operated.
That’s all on/off control though, I’m not sure how you might go about dimmers. I think I’d want some dimming.
Wired burglar alarm PIRs are cheap and energy efficient. Not at all sure I’d want motion-controlled lighting inside a motorhome, but maybe you have other uses for occupancy detection
Yeah - I’m thinking more and more on a half-way solution: Cross-Wiring the wallswitches (as we need >1 switches for up to four light groups) - and later on you always can have some automating also cross-wired into the existing system. That way we’ll have more wires in the car - but are not dependend on some technology which either drains the battery in standby or could be interfered as you just described.
and yes - the beauty of it would be, that I can have either sort of relay wired in some place for easy OH-access…
No “do this” answers here. Hope others will chime in with ideas.