How to plan your KNX 

smart home in a new build

In our experience, demanding building owners are not only interested in automatic functions for air conditioning, shading, lighting, etc., but also in tangible quality, good design and high value of the switches, touchscreens and high-quality visualizations. It should be clear to everyone that the end result is a uniform operating concept.

The idea behind a good concept: a sophisticated building with KNX bus and KNX cabling takes care of controlling the most important functions and processes itself. With one or two button clicks, the desired KNX scenarios can be called up and the house reacts automatically to different situations.  

KNX never from one manufacturer!

What characterizes all our building owner projects? What are the KNX basics? Each KNX Smart Home is individually developed from a Variety of products from different manufacturers and finely tuned to personal requirements. If everything came from one manufacturer (e.g. Gira KNX), then would lead the concept of KNX ad absurdum become! Why is that? Because every manufacturer has its unique strengths and weaknesses in its KNX products.

That’s why our design is always about using the best products on the global market that we have tested and approved beforehand. It doesn’t matter which manufacturer is used for a particular sensor or actuator .

300 lights and 40 blinds at the same time

The KNX smart home system can be controlled locally room by room, floor by floor or centrally for the entire building. This can be done using KNX switches, beautiful touchscreens or a large iPad for operation. For example, the shading of 40 windows can be operated simultaneously and automatically at sunset or at the touch of a button.  

Or the lighting of a larger house – consisting of over 300 luminaires, for example – can be set to specific brightness and color values at the touch of a button. We often call this “mood at the touch of a button”.

A real party atmosphere is created by colored light sequences that can transform a larger room into a dance studio if desired. These are the same lights that previously “only” illuminated the room.  

What does a KNX Smart Home consist of?

To put it simply in a nutshell: A KNX smart home system consists of various KNX sensors, KNX actuators, KNX buttons, detectors and control elements that are connected to each other via a green KNX bus line (KNX cabling) within a house. In an individual house with a higher level of complexity, this means 150 actuators and sensors.  

These components within the KNX system must be connected to each other via KNX cable, as in our experience experience a possible “KNX radio transmission” very often causes problems with ceilings and walls made of reinforced concrete.

8,000 meters of cable, 500 sockets 

So it’s better to do it right and connect everything via KNX cable! In addition, there are 8,000 to 12,000 meters of electrical cable for a wide variety of purposes: sockets, high-quality lighting, shading with zip screens/blinds, multi-room audio speakers, network sockets and burglar-proof contacts.