More functionality & less cabling — the automotive wiring principle, at home.
The same glass panels are the light switches, the room thermostats and the blind controls — and they all live on one 4-core cable. Step through how each trade wires their part, swap lenses to see each trade’s tidy world, then drive the house.
A home full of things to control — and three trades who usually trip over each other.
Concept animation, not an installation guide — routes illustrative, containment and regulations out of scope; live-side conductors only; wax actuator travel compressed in time. The system is genuinely modular: the electrician’s cabinet sits at the consumer unit, the plumber’s own cabinet sits right at the manifold, each with its own local 15 V supply. The glass panels and PIR are wired straight off the electrician’s cabinet, not the plumber’s — so the heating system can be isolated for service without ever losing lighting control. Every cable lands on a real colour-coded CANbus junction block sitting in the electrician’s own cabinet — red +15 V, black 0V, white Data Low, yellow Data High — and the plumber’s side of that block never gets a +15 V terminal populated, carrying just Data High, Data Low and 0V common. Bridging +Vcc between separately powered segments is exactly what Velbus’s own drawings warn against, and further marshalling boxes elsewhere in a build simply repeat the same block. Heating shown the preferred way: relay channels on the plumber’s own rack drive heads and pump as plain loads (each testable before any programming), while the actuators’ own microswitches pull in a dumb interlock pair — which is Part L’s mandatory boiler interlock, in hardware you can point at. Some installs simply common the microswitch pairs straight to the heat source instead; the bus side is identical either way. Every room here gets a real thermostat — glass on the wall measuring the room, not a wax head sitting in the radiator’s own heat — and every zone can call for heat. Adding zones is, as the source drawings put it, more of the same identical wiring in parallel — the same is true at 20 zones as at three.
Velbus · installers.velbus.co.uk · drawings: velbus.co.uk/downloads