1 600 m², 1 877 group addresses — and every single one of them carries a name
- Floor area
- 1 600 m²Floor area
- KNX devices
- 145KNX devices
- Group addresses
- 1 877Group addresses
- Of them named
- 100 %Of them named
Overview
A 1 600 m² residence over two floors, with a facade, outdoor areas and a guest house. Full scope: lighting, climate, blinds, underfloor heating and multimedia. Works ran for three years and the installation was handed over in 2025 — which means it was never a single build but a sequence of stages, each one commissioned while the next was still being designed.
Challenge
At 1 877 group addresses an installation stops being a wiring problem and becomes a documentation problem. Nobody holds that many addresses in their head, and the moment one of them is unnamed it is effectively lost: to find out what it does you have to put a bus monitor on it and switch things until something moves.
A three-year build makes it worse. Stages were commissioned while later ones were still on paper, so the project was edited continuously by several people over a long period — exactly the conditions under which naming discipline normally collapses. The usual result is a project where the first floor is documented, the last one is a field of unnamed addresses, and nobody can say when the standard was abandoned.
The site is also not one building. Two floors, a facade, outdoor areas and a guest house have different working hours, different consequences when something fails, and different people touching them.
Solution
Every one of the 1 877 addresses is named. Not most of them, not the ones that were awkward to leave blank — all of them. That is the number on this page worth more than the size of the installation, because it is the difference between a project that can be handed to another engineer and one that has to be reverse-engineered on site.
The bus is split into four lines by function rather than only by floor: ground floor, first floor, outdoor, and the BBQ area. Splitting by floor alone would have put the outdoor and BBQ circuits on whichever line was nearest, and a fault in a garden lighting circuit would then sit on the same line as the bedrooms. Separating them keeps a fault, a firmware update or a future extension inside the part of the site it belongs to.
Five manufacturers run on that one bus — Ekinex, Theben, Elsner Elektronik, Zennio and a CoolAutomation gateway for the air conditioning. Mixing vendors is only safe when the addressing scheme is the contract between them, which is the other reason the naming was not allowed to slip.
Systems & Technologies
In numbers
- Group addresses
- 1 877Group addresses
- Named, none left blank
- 100 %Named, none left blank
- KNX devices
- 145KNX devices
- Lines split by function
- 4Lines split by function
- Vendors on one bus
- 5Vendors on one bus
- Years of staged commissioning
- 3Years of staged commissioning
Project Details
- Object type
- Private residence
- Area
- 1 600 m²
- Commissioned
- 2025
- Technologies
- KNX
Discuss a Project
Result
The installation was handed over with a project that reads without us: 1 877 named addresses, four lines whose boundaries match the parts of the site they serve, and five manufacturers held together by one addressing scheme.
Shading is part of the scope here, and it is worth being precise about which part of it pays for itself — of everything sold as energy saving, blind control is the one item where the arithmetic is honest.
What remains unresolved
Three years of staged commissioning is not the same as three years of continuous building. Parts of the installation were designed before anyone knew how the house would actually be lived in, and some of those decisions were made twice — the second time with the building occupied, which is the expensive way to learn.
Two of the four lines are thin: the outdoor line carries three devices and the BBQ area six. Separating them was a deliberate choice about fault isolation, but a line coupler for three devices only pays off if the outdoor scope grows later. On a smaller object we would not make the same call.
The group address export is not published here yet. Unlike the 860 m² project, a number of names in this one carry room designations that have to be translated and checked before anything goes online — we would rather publish it late than publish it raw.