Whole house powerdown

[shaneh]

Hello all,

I'm just having  the house fully rewired and wanted to have a system that would allow me to power down the whole house apart from the fridge, the heating auxillaries and a double socket in each of the bedrooms. Has anyone had any experience with setting something like this up? My fusebox is in the garage so i can't do it direct from there.

thanks
Shane

[cj]

Would it be worth conduits or pull wires left to allow power / data / tv cables to be run subsequently more easily?

I have thought how useful a secondary wiring system would be for essential items fridge, escape lighting, alarms, heating control/pump etc, that can be run from a battery backed UPS, or generator. Other circuits can be turned off when the house is empty to save power and reduce fire risk.  Then when the grid collapses for weeks, life will be bearable.

With electromagnetic storms, or major failure, I do wonder how easily the grid could be restarted when the rapidly increasing Solar PV and possibly wind turbines can not assist in start up, only contribute once grid up and running.

[tony.]

It done all the time in shops, a switch generally a key switch is used to operate a contactor.

It all depends on your board configuration.

Best to have 2 boards essentil for the. Fridge etc and another controlled by the contactor.

Only 2 wires required to control the congactor.

Tony

[daftlad]

Has anyone had any experience with setting something like this up? My fusebox is in the garage so i can't do it direct from there.

Quite a common thing in commercial and industrial applications, a "last man out switch in an office" The best way to do it is from the fusebox location, either you put in 2 fuse boxes or 1 box which has room for contactors to switch the circuits on and off.
Why can't it be done from the garage?

peas

like what Tony said

[Baz]

So what, you're just going to leave the lights, tv, etc on at midnight and hit the big switch as you go to bed? Then at 8am you want the radio on so you switch it all on again so the house is full of things that are on but don't need to be and you have to go round turning them off. What happens if you get up in the middle of the night with no lights?
I think you would be better off doing a really thoughful 'walk through' of each room and its loads and think about making the switches more accessible, eg following the continental pattern of switches by the door to control sockets.

[EccentricAnomaly]

With electromagnetic storms, or major failure, I do wonder how easily the grid could be restarted when the rapidly increasing Solar PV and possibly wind turbines can not assist in start up, only contribute once grid up and running.

Off-topic for this thread but my rantlet related to this: Electrical Islanding Writ Large.

[profp]

We have a variation on your setup. We have four power socket ring mains - two upstairs and two down. Each ring main is broken out at the fuse board and can be connected to a genset supply or solar off-grid supply. The lighting circuits are also terminated in a similar way, allowing us to bypass the inverter if necessary.
The original plan was to only connect essential loads to the inverter, and allow it to sleep when not in use. In practice we're pretty much genset independent, except for mid-winter, and the inverter does all the work - with hindsight, turned out we did the right thing to build in that flexibility - and we also appreciated being able to switch back to genset only use when we had an early inverter failure.

Hth...

[shaneh]

thanks all (accept baz),

yeah... it's from the commercial environment that i'd taken inspiration. i'm changing the fuse box so hopefull finding one with capacity for contactors will be the way forward.

@ baz - just negative.... in a forum that is about """automation"""" to assume that the person making the post wants to automate and has bad habits is pretty negative.

[Quakered]

Not very edifying to see someone throw their toys out of the pram when someone proffers advice or thoughts that you bon't want to hear.

some, more critical than me, might think that having one switch instead of 3 or 4 does not really qualify as "automation"

As a newbie a little less pomposity might encourage the regulars to offer help to any future questions you might raise.

[shaneh]

Apologies baz, I've just re-read your post prompted by Patrick's comments and realised that I miss  understood what you'd said first time round. Ironically you made a good suggestion.