ESSENTIAL CEDIA

KNX IN THE HOME

Pip Evans, Director of CEDIA Member of Excellence NV Integration, examines the possibilities presented by KNX.

KNX is often mistaken as a product, but it is an open platform – it’s like a language. Products use the KNX language to communicate with each other and this blows the playing field wide open. You have hundreds of manufacturers making thousands of products, meaning that there is always the right puzzle piece needed for every project so that you can design a very modular and flexible system.

KNX has been around for over 30 years. I think, (historically), it was aimed at the commercial market - as you can have up to 61,000 devices in a project. However, the products are not commercially focussed or commercially minded in terms of aesthetics. It’s much wider than that, meaning that just as the products would work well in a Private Members Club or a 5-star hotel, they will also suit a very prestigious home or a block of luxury flats.

Like most CEDIA integrators, we came to KNX from the AV and IT side, our reason for exploring the options with KNX is through the need we have in being able to deliver more. KNX opens the doors to so many possibilities.

In our projects, we usually feature both centralised and decentralised systems. We pride ourselves in offering our clients unbiased consultancy to provide them with the system that’s right for them. So, if we are working on a full house system, we are still going to have a headend, we are still going to have a centralised network system and we are still going to have our decentralised aspects as well.

As an integrator, you need to be multiskilled. If we went into a project and just said that (we are here to sell you a KNX system), then we would probably lose a lot of jobs because some people might want to have more than that KNX system is capable of. Being a good integrator is about being a good multitasker and picking the right bolt-ons for the right project.

When it comes to deciding between whether to use a server or a KNX distributed approach, it’s dependent on each project. We have found that we are using servers more and more in different shapes and sizes. However, the important thing to remember is that because it’s a decentralised system, whether you have that server or not, each device carries a piece of intelligence. As long as you have designed and commissioned the system in the correct and proper fashion to make sure that the systems will talk to each other without the brain in the middle, then the homeowner can have the confidence that the system will carry on working even if the server goes down.

Going forward, I think there’s a lot of going on around wellness and people placing more value and importance on their home being their haven. KNX has some great solutions that play into this market. For example, an air quality sensor could be installed into the bathroom occupancy sensor. That could then be integrated into the ventilation system, and that occupancy sensor can also turn on the domestic hot water pump so that you get hot water fast. All this is set up without you having to have an extra PIR for that separate device because it’s all one clever system that’s talking to each other.

That’s the really nice thing about KNX. You might end up using four or five different manufacturers to have the building control talk to the home automation systems to feed back to the lighting control system to make something happen. Obviously, that’s what we do, but there are potentially more points of failure. With a KNX system, you minimise these risks and can have more of a streamlined approach.

KNX RF has recently been released to allow you to create and deploy hybrid systems, which are suited to areas where you can’t get cable or maybe you can only get local power. We sometimes use RF lighting control systems in a retrofit sense as we’ve always found it to be super reliable. We haven’t yet worked with KNX RF, but I’m sure it would work great.

If you are looking to get started with KNX, CEDIA has recently launched the hybrid KNX basic course, which explores all the aspects of the KNX protocol. The hybrid training includes six self-paced online modules, followed by a two-day on-site practical course.

CEDIA/KNX cedia.net/knx.