We moved to our new house on 2 August 2004. Before moving in, we had spent a lot of time considering our requirements for automation.

Most of our furniture went in to storage to make sure that there was room for the initial work to be done. First thing in the morning of 3 August, Ben Addison arrived accompanied by Mikey. We gave them a cup of tea to get them ready for work. Ben had a look around to make sure that everything stacked up with the plan that we had been sharing with him for some time.

A few minor changes to Ben's thinking were made following the inspection. For example, rather than running wiring in trunking inside the airing cupboard, Ben decided to take advantage of a pipe cavity running down from the loft to the first floor. It also became clear that the best way to get cables into Node 0 (the garage) would be to lift the floor in the guest bedroom.

So, by the end of the first day, most of the floor in the guest room had been lifted. The flooring is solid 22mm board and runs continuously under the internal walls. To avoid the trauma of lifting many boards and lots of sawing, we used a Routabout.

The internal walls were largely plasterboard and battens, allowing cables to be dropped in with only a few holes needed.

The external walls were a different matter with some fairly large craters needing to be dug! Fortunately Ben was later able to demonstrate his plastering skills and now, following painting, you would never know. More...

Ben and Mikey concentrated on the downstairs first - pulling in:

• Cat5 network cables
• extra lighting cables for table lamps etc.
• that tastefully coloured C-Bus Cat5 cable
• screened cable for Comfort keypads
• alarm cable for extra PIRs
• alarm cable for window contacts
• low voltage power supplies for curtains.

In short, lots of cables - nearly all of them heading back to Node 0 in the garage. More...

Next, the action moved upstairs:

• existing looped-in mains wiring for the downstairs lights was replaced with new star-wired cabling back to Node 0 in the garage
• More network cabling went in to the upstairs sockets
• More pink C-Bus cable for the upstairs light switches
• Rewiring of the upstairs light, star-wired with cable in the loft
• Lighting cable to the positions for security lights

The consumer unit was reconfigured to feed the four C-Bus output units, with a separate MCB for each. The few lights (bathroom, cloakroom and loft) that had not been rewired for C-Bus were linked to appropriate MCBs.

Ben and Mikey worked extremely long hours and finally managed to get the job finished late on Sunday evening. We are so glad that we didn't try to tackle the work ourselves!

I had already configured the software according to our needs. This helped Ben as we could just install the input units (switches) and let the network detect them automatically - this saved some time. It also meant that we had a good working knowledge of the C-Bus system and were happy to address any future programming changes ourselves.

Our next visitor was Chris from Peake Electrical. His job was to rip out the alarm panel supplied by the builders and replace it with a Comfort. The existing alarm zones were linked into Comfort. The additional cables (link to Node 0, two keypads, one doorphone) were all behind the wall - exactly where Ben and Mikey had marked. By the time Chris finished, the Comfort panel was working and there was a slave panel in the garage waiting for more work to be done. One of the longest parts of the job was creating a neat hole in the brickwork by the front door, in which to mount the doorphone.

Ben and Mikey had routed the cables for the new PIRs and the window contacts to Node 0 in the garage. These are now connected to the Comfort expansion unit.

Some of the rooms have Goelst curtain tracks. Others have Somfy blinds. In both cases, 24 volt power comes from a single supply in the garage. This avoids any clutter around the window areas. The remote control facilities are also routed back to Node 0. Comfort is configured to pulse these as necessary to open/close the curtains/blind. There is a C-Bus interface located within the Comfort panel. This monitors the C-Bus for changes in group addresses. This allows C-Bus switches to request that Comfort operates the curtains.