This is why you never hire an electrician to do installations

A firmware upgrade would be great Jaco thanks!

I will be home for at least the whole of March and probably Feb as well.

Anytime you have time or are in neighborhood.

So in my quest to automate my house, I am now moving to the garage door. I bought the same unit as for the gate which runs on the Connex Connect app.

To make installation easier, I’m opting to wire the unit directly to the motor instead of the trigger switch at the wall.

Attached is a photo of the small pc board of the Pro Alpha 2000 garage door motor and the wires going into it that comes from the wall mounted trigger switch.

So the positive and negative trigger wire of the wifi unit, where would these go?

Though not visible from the photo, the connector to the very left is negative.

As I recall that Conex thing needed a 230V supply, and I don’t see any in your picture.

Taking a wild stab at the rest, the black and red wires to the right looks like the usual 12V supply, probably going to the external remote control receiver (that’s what is in the picturem right?). It looks as if someone put the wires the wrong way round, red seems to be wired to the terminal labelled NEG. Nice…

I assume the green and white wires opens the door when shorted together. So the trigger wire of the conex would go to the same two terminals, in parallel.

Easy to test. Take a bit of wire, short the green and white terminals together, check that the door opens.

Man, if I asked this question here and it was speculated what goes where me and the infamous smoke would have had a conversation.

:rofl:

I feel fairly confident in advising a short between green and white, since the terminals are marked common and N/O (normally open). That means there is a relay wired to those terminals, which is also how I deduce that I’m looking at a picture of the remote receiver.

The red and black wires being the wrong way around… what I mean is they break the convention. It is perfectly fine to use whatever colour you want, as long as you do it on both sides. But in general, we prefer black to be negative and red to be positive. So just watch out… use a DMM and make sure, don’t trust the colours.

There is a plug right next to the garage motor so that part is covered.

This immediately ticked me off but the thing works so I don’t want to mess with it.

Now this has me exited. Going to do that shortly.

Digital multimeter to check for polarity on black and red, check.

No smoke!!! :laughing:

Plonkster for president!!! Green and white are the trigger wires.

Thank you so so much! The polarity test must wait because my one multimeter I left in the wife’s car when we went to replace her battery, and the other one resides permanently with my mother when I help with odd jobbies there.

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You probably don’t even need to worry about those two wires. You aren’t using them. You’re using the green and white wires to trigger, powering from a separate 230V supply, and the open/closed sensor is that reed switch thing which you will mount to the door itself. If my calculations are correct, you have everything you need already.

Also true!

eish and i thought i was colour blind… even at greyscale this is a disaster - rainbow nation comes to mind :see_no_evil:

While wiring up solar panels on my sister’s roof, I noticed this:

It looks like the electrician drilled the holes for the downlights without checking where the rafters are, ended up below one (predictably), and then decided he would rather hack away half of the rafter with a screwdriver than relocate the downlight 3cm to either side.

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I know this story. That’s why with my solar installation I asked the accredited CoCT inspector to instruct me as to what needed to be done and how. He kept asking who my installer was and I repeatedly said that I was going to be doing the work.
He then came round and I thought this would a be an initial kick off meeting to identify what need to be done. He made some dubious recommendations (such as a changeover switch with my grid tie inverter) and then left.
I then received an invoice for R6k ex VAT for ‘Final documentation’
The job hasn’t been started, let alone completed!
Do these inspectors belong to some organisation that I can take this matter up with?

It requires patching up the hole in the ceiling as well, so while whittling a hole into a beam (nevermind a rafter) is still a no-no, one can at least understand the temptation to do so (and avoid patching the ceiling, which is forever visible unless you replace the whole thing).

A tool I found quite useful for this, is a “stud finder”. Not very commonly used in SA (not due to a lack of studs, but due to us not using drywalling as much as Americans). It can help you find the location of rafters and beams in a ceiling, and then through some planning you can find equidistant locations that looks right from below, but misses the wooden structures up top. They are super cheap as well, so electricians really have no excuse not to use one.

The fee for this is usually at least 4k. Presumably the fellow is a professional engineer (or he will contract one for that part) and those are their fees. CoCT requires a Pr.Eng. to sign off, so there is no way around it. The documentation is quite a bit of work as well. If you do your own line drawing, submit the initial permission to install documentation yourself, and then get the Pr.Eng. yourself later, you may be able to get this down to less. But you still need a CoC from a sparky, and that’s going to be extra, so… you won’t get away for much under 4.5k, best case.

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When the solar engineering signoff started, on the other forum, I had a virtual “vloermoer” when I was quoted R10k ex vat for an off-grid system.

“What flabbergast is this!” I thought at the time.

Backlash … how dare I challenge professional fees!?

Well, simple. My mother taught me to ask for prices, even with Dr’s and dentists. All are businesses.

Result:
Found damn good engineers that stepped up who also saw the nonsense in the prices some wanted to charge when the sparkie do all the work.

Chose @Rautenk to sign off mine back then.

Paying what people perceive the “market rate” is supposed to be, does not make it so. You can ask around.

Titbit - why I won’t pay exorbitant rates:
+10 years back I had to get engineers, yes, plural, for our house.

First engineer, market related quote, quoted me 30% of the total building cost for the engineering works.
WHAT!!! So you take 30% on the toilet, and that on a estimated of “going building prices”!?
He told me to never contact him again.

So I got engineers that specialize in i.e. concrete stairs (who also supplied the man to build them), slabs + foundation specialist of the slab we wanted to install.

Joke is, after a decade, all those engineers emigrated, moved on.

Paying big bucks today does NOT mean the person will be around 5/10/30 years IF there is drama.

Life happens.

Yeah, the cheapest one I found charges 3.5k. And he doesn’t do the rest of the documentation, you or your installer needs to do that. If you want a hands-off experience where someone just handles this for you, you’re not getting this for less than 6k unless you convince the Pr.Eng to take less :slight_smile:

Good one to note!!!

What I did, on good advices:
Sparkie doing the work SHOULD complete the work as per the engineers specs, with copious photos to confirm such. CoC to indicate job is completed.
I filled in the copious amount of details that I could.

Make the effort, and save some bucks I was told.

Rautenk has a BIG Excel document sent to the client.
Client and the Sparkie completes it, with proof.
Also serves to ensure the job is done right, for the client, IF s[he] stays involved.
Do the effort, do it right, the right Sparkie is crucial, and the engineers time is not "wasted’.

If you want “hands off”, “not your problem/job” … no problem, your wallet can step in anytime.

We need to check what we get for the money. I paid R5K plus the cost of some required signage for my SSEG registration. But the company did all the paperwork. I signed a document empowering them to act on my behalf, and they took care of everything else. I probably could have got it done cheaper, but I’d have spent a lot of time standing in queues, so for me this was an OK deal.

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It’s actually fairly easy fixable without leaving any evidence behind: Glue a piece of ceiling board over the hole and then glue the circular bit that was cut out back into position. A little bit of Polyfilla around the edges and some ceiling paint later and no-one will know about the faux pas.

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Aaah yes, of course, That’s true as well. But then, you usually hit the beam/rafter when you drill the last hole of 6. Now, are you going to patch the previous 5 holes, put that one lamp out of line with the rest, or just make a bit of room in that beam, heh? :stuck_out_tongue:

Still no excuse of course, hence my suggestion to use a stud finder. They aren’t terribly accurate, but you can usually get a fairly good idea where the thick stuff is.

Last time I was involved in the drilling of downlight holes, we had a near-miss on a rafter on the 4th hole. It was the one where the stud finder was sort of inconclusive… there may be something here, maybe not. So we marked new spots 50mm further away, drilled… and just barely missed the rafter :slight_smile: