DALI Lighting Control Services Sydney
DALI for optimal light control
DALI was created as an open standard for controlling and dimming light fittings. The main reason it’s so popular nowadays is because it ensures that LED fittings are dimmed properly without flickering instead of being dimmed with phase dimmers (leading and trailing edge) which were really designed for a different type of (legacy incandescent lighting) technology altogether.
The benefits of working with DALI
DALI has many benefits, some which include the following:
- Installation of DALI systems is extremely simple and requires very little thinking once the concept is understood. This means that although the DALI fittings maybe a little more expensive, the savings in wiring even out the overall costs.
- DALI lighting can be “re-grouped” and reconfigured in software to include different lighting arrangements or groups of lights when office floor layouts or home floor plans get changed around instead of physical wires having to be re-run, chopped or changed.
- DALI lights can let the building manager know when they’ve expired, how long they’ve running for, how much energy they’ve consumed and whether or not they’re having problems on the network. All this information allows buildings to be better maintained through pro-active maintenance programmes with less disruption to tenants.
DALI – an open standard for smart homes
- Given that DALI is an open standard, it’s not proprietary or owned by any one single company. As a result, DALI fittings are produced by a plethora of manufacturers which ensures competition and an overall consistency in quality. Only after having passed stringent compliance measures can a manufacturer place the DALI logo on its products.
- Using DALI light fittings substantially reduces the amount of lighting control system actuators (i.e. dimmers and relays) required in a home automation project and provides superior control and flexibility to the homeowner.
- As the basic DALI line only supports a maximum of 64 light fittings, broader lighting control systems such as C-Bus, Dynalite, KNX and Rapix (amongst many others) are required to “stitch” together many lines across larger projects.
Working with DALI systems
There are some basic principles of the DALI lighting system wiring that need to be observed in order for the magic to happen.
- The basic element of a DALI lighting system is the DALI Line.
- A single DALI line is a twin cable (preferably no less than 1.5mm2 CSA) and must be double insulated like TPS mains rated cable. The double insulation is for protection from electrocution as the electrical isolation within each DALI driver is only functional (not Galvanic).
- The DALI line voltage sits at around 16VDC and does not have a polarity (i.e. plus or minus) which means that as long as the twin cable is never shorted along its run, it can be connected in any orientation across the DALI D1 and D2 terminals of the fitting.
- The total length of copper in a DALI line should never exceed 300m.
- The single most important tenet is that a line can never have more than 64 DALI fittings on it. In fact, a good practise is to leave a 10-20% headroom on each line and limit the total number to around 55 – for flexibility and future capacity.
DALI installations done right!
Like everything, DALI lighting can offer great benefits when implemented the right way. It’s very important to seek advice from reputable industry partners such as Control Freq, regarding the application at hand and for unbiased advice on how to best approach the solution. Control Freq specialises in many lighting control systems and is well placed to provide knowledgeable advice based on more than 20 years industry experience.
We help you solve DALI system issues
Control Freq can solve you solve DALI system installation issues. We are product-matter specialists able to take on any challenge.
If your lighting control system or smart home installation is problematic, reach out to an expert team to resolve your issues quickly and professionally. Control Freq works with architects, designers, property managers and electricians throughout Sydney. Trust the team that powers residential and commercial smart buildings to do it right.
