Electrical Plan

We’ve done our electrical plan. I wanted electric and data points every metre everywhere, but of course there was compromise. I also wanted the spotlights from the Sydney Opera House above my kitchen workbench, but again we found some middle ground.

Smart Homes allocated us a consultant just for this part of the house infrastructure design. It’s that important. We went to meet him at Osbourne Park, and found him very friendly, thus answering Gary Numan’s 1979 question. What worked for us was a bundle/unbundle technique, which saw us going over-the-top with our ‘additions’, and then unbundling our excesses later, in the comfort of our study. I think we’ll spend an extra 10 grand, but we unbundled at least 7 and have still got a nice balance. I’ve been told 10 is about right. You can view our latest electrical plan here.

What we kept was the dimming and the automation. We’ve got almost everything in the new house dimmable. We retained some of the automation, but kept it around the front of the house, for when we enter/depart. We’ve also made the automation side scalable, so when we get tired of standing up to turn off the kitchen light, we can get our ever-present phone out and do it while watching telly instead. We’ve got those raised lighting troughs in the Master Bedroom, Living and Home Theatre rooms and these will also be controlled by phone or iPad. Thankfully, I don’t do the foreign networking equipment, so I won’t be getting my lights switched on or off from Beijing.

Our electric friend at Smart recommended the ‘Wiser Home’ automation from Clipsal, which is part of Schneider Electric. Clipsal started in Australia in the 1920s and has retained factories in Australia despite the trend to ‘offshore’. Buying local is important to me these days, I’m an independent chap and even though I’m small fry compared to the Australian wine growers, or the German gas companies, it is clear to me the long-term effects of relying on products and consumables from despotic nations. I’m just doing my small bit. I can even (begrudgingly) live with Clipsal being owned by the French, now that they have stopped bleating about being fired for their crap submarine building and we have entered a new ‘entente cordiale’. It looks like Albanese has found them as easy to get around as the Germans did the Maginot Line.

I hate cables. The origin of my loathing stems from the Bloodhound Mk II Surface-to-Air Missile. I worked as an ‘L’ man in the RAF during two tours in the 80s, looking after all the electronics in the Launch Control Post (LCP). The LCP was a transportable cabin that housed computers, displays and firing mechanisms for eight missiles, each missile weighing over two tonnes. The missiles were located about 200 metres away from the LCP and connected to the LCP by around 15 large cables of varying diameters – some cables were around 15 centimetres in diameter, and very heavy as a result. Changing a cable was hard. A team would be assembled of at least two, but as many as you could get, from the people who were bad at hiding. Then, in the pouring rain (for this was England), the team would disconnect the cable from each end and wind it on to a large metal spool bigger then the tallest among us. Then they would pull the incredibly heavy new cable off another spool, laying it (into buried concrete cable-runs) the 200 metres down to the launcher. Then came the connection and testing, which invariably failed because the junior technician had bent a pin in the connecting part during fitting, or because the new cable itself was broken, having sat on a cold spool for several months or years. So, a repeat was performed until our missile was restored to health. If the problem was a bent pin that could not be fixed, it was mandatory for the offending junior technician to do the lion’s share of the subsequent effort, and for them to buy everyone beers in the NAAFI at the end of the day. Some junior technicians perished during the third cable run.