67 m², 362 group addresses — including an air handling unit that speaks no KNX
- Floor area
- 67 m²Floor area
- KNX devices
- 29KNX devices
- Group addresses
- 362Group addresses
- Of them named
- 100 %Of them named
Overview
A 67 m² city apartment, handed over in 2024 after a year of works. Lighting on DALI and on switching actuators, fan coil control, three air conditioning units, blinds, multiroom audio on RTI, and a Breezart air handling unit. Dense automation in a small footprint: 362 group addresses over 29 devices.
Challenge
The air handling unit is a Breezart, and a Breezart has no KNX interface. On most projects that is where the conversation ends: the unit keeps its own wall panel, the client learns two interfaces instead of one, and the ventilation stays outside every scene in the apartment.
That is the ordinary shape of vendor lock-in — not a contract clause, but a box that will not talk to anything and quietly forces the rest of the installation to work around it.
The second constraint is space. Sixty-seven square metres leaves no room for a second cabinet, so everything — DALI gateway, actuators, controller — has to fit the one that exists.
Solution
The Breezart is driven from a KNX wall panel through our own automation controller. The controller speaks the unit's own protocol on one side and KNX on the other, translating exactly once, in one place: on the panel the ventilation is another set of group objects, indistinguishable in operation from lighting or climate.
What the user gets is what matters daily — on, off, speed, setpoint and the unit's status — and the ventilation can therefore take part in scenes. What stays out of reach is the unit's deeper service parameters, which remain in the manufacturer's own interface where they belong.
Lighting runs partly on DALI, through a gateway, and partly on switching actuators. DALI earns its place where fixtures need addressable dimming and diagnostics; where a circuit only has to go on and off, a relay channel is cheaper and simpler, and mixing the two deliberately is how a small apartment stays affordable without giving up control.
Systems & Technologies
Built in-house
In numbers
- Group addresses
- 362Group addresses
- Named, none left blank
- 100 %Named, none left blank
- KNX devices
- 29KNX devices
- TP line
- 1TP line
- Vendors, one a DALI gateway
- 3Vendors, one a DALI gateway
Project Details
- Object type
- Apartment
- Area
- 67 m²
- Commissioned
- 2024
- Technologies
- KNXDALI
Discuss a Project
Result
One panel operates the whole apartment, ventilation included — the piece of equipment that was never meant to be reachable from a bus.
All 362 addresses are named, on an apartment as much as on a house. The size of the object is not what decides whether the next engineer can read the project.
What remains unresolved
Twenty-nine devices sit on a single TP line. That is well within the electrical limits, but it leaves almost no structural headroom: an extension of any size means either a second line and a coupler, or accepting that a fault anywhere is a fault everywhere. In an apartment that is usually the right trade — there is rarely a second phase — but it is a trade, not an oversight.
The ventilation is integrated at the level of daily operation, not completely. Service parameters, filter counters and the unit's own scheduling stay in the manufacturer's interface. Presenting them on the panel would mean maintaining a translation for settings that are touched once a year, and that is maintenance we would rather the client did not inherit.
The group address export is not published for this object. It is small enough that the address names describe rooms directly, and that is exactly the kind of detail we do not put online.