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Hi all,

The Xanura documentation claims that no rewriring is needed. However, the use of Xanura requires that there are live and neutral wires running to each and every wall switch and outlet in which you want to apply a Xanura module.

My question is: is this a fair assumption?

I opened a number of wall switches in my house and was not surprised to find only a brown and a black wire (live and switching wire).

Furthermore, if I look at the examples of Xanura configurations in Chapter 4 of the Xanura technical manual ("handboek", see also http://www.bwired.nl/images/how/Xanura_technical.pdf) I see some major rewiring going on, both for a basic switch, as well as (and especially) for a "hotel" switch.

At least I need to run one blue (neutral) wire from the "centraal-doos" to the switch to make a basic switch work. And for a hotel switch we are talking about adding two blue wires, one brown wire and removing two black ones...

So I was wondering: what are your experiences with your electrical installations? Did you have to go through this rewiring exercise as well? Or am I wrong in some way?

Thanks,

Lennart

Hi Lennart,
You are completely right, I had to place extra blue wires to make it work. So I think for almost all the houses in the Netherlands this will be required to do so. I'm not sure if now all the new houses are standard equipped with blue and brown wiring on a switch.
Pieter

Some modules don't require this extra neutral wire, but these modules are all unidirectional modules, not the bidirectional modules Pieter and myself prefer to use. Besides that, these modules power themselves by letting some current leaking through the load. With a regular light bulb this works fine, but with some fluourecent lamps this might not be enough to power the module.

To keep rewiring to a minumum for circuits with multiple switches, you may consider to have the switches switch the Neutral instead of the Live. This way you can connect the end of the switch chain directly to the input of the Xanura module.