What are the opening hours?

Monday 08:00 - 05:00 Tuesday 08:00 - 17:00 Wednesday 08:00 - 17:00 Thursday 08:00 - 17:00 Friday 08:00 - 13:00

KNX Logic

Name: KNX Logic
Address: 8 St Columb Road, Johannesburg, ZA
Telephone: +27825643982

With over a decade in the buidling automation industry we have fallen in love with the KNX standard.

Bringing quality and scalability to the process we are happy to serve your automation needs.

07/08/2026

Matter just learned to talk to the electricity grid. KNX's been doing it for years, no cloud required. Full post in the comments. 👇

06/08/2026

Every second project starts the same way. The client has seen what's possible, lighting scenes, blinds that track the sun, one button that locks up the whole house on the way out, and then they ask: "So should we automate everything? The kettle? The curtains in the guest room?"

My answer is no, and working out where to stop is honestly most of what I get paid to think about.

There's a real backlash happening in the smart home world right now. People who automated everything are quietly turning things back to manual, not out of nostalgia, out of exhaustion. A light that won't turn on because the Wi-Fi dropped. A voice command that fails because the phrasing wasn't exact. The pattern is always the same: something got automated and the manual option got removed at the same time, so when the system has a bad day, there's no fallback.

My rule with every client: automate what's routine, repetitive, or safety-related. Leave the personal, momentary stuff (mood lighting for a dinner party, whether music is playing) manual. And every automated function needs a physical way to override it, one that works even if the network's down or a guest has no idea what voice command you use.

I wrote up the full breakdown of how I actually scope this on every project. Link in the comments.

Just a conversation about what the project needs.

05/08/2026

Most people think a smoke detector and a gas detector do the same job. They don't, and if yours is mounted in the wrong spot, it might never catch the thing it's there to catch.

Natural gas is lighter than air, so a leak rises straight up and pools near the ceiling. LPG, the kind in a bottled cylinder, is heavier than air and sinks toward the floor. Mount a detector at "normal" alarm height, the way most people instinctively would, and you've built one that will very reliably miss the leak it's meant to warn you about.

With more Joburg homes running a gas hob, a gas heater, or an LPG bottle as backup for load shedding nights, this matters more than it used to. Placement isn't a small detail. It's the whole point.

The good news: mounted properly, near the ceiling for natural gas, low to the floor for LPG, away from windows and extractor fans, a gas detector can do more than beep. Wired into a KNX system, the same detector can trigger ventilation, cut non-essential circuits, and send an alert straight to your phone the moment it trips.

We help clients get this right from the planning stage, before the ceiling's closed up and the gas line disappears behind a wall.

Full breakdown in the comments. Questions about your own setup? Just a conversation about what the project needs.

04/08/2026

A client told me recently his house was "fully automated" because he could switch every light off from his phone before bed. That's not automation, that's a remote control with better range. If you still have to notice something and act on it yourself, the house didn't do anything on its own.

Real automation is a loop: a sensor picks up a condition, logic decides what it means, an actuator carries out the response. Miss any one of those three and you get something else instead, a scene you have to trigger yourself, switches with no rules behind them, or a system that knows what it wants to happen with no way to make it happen.

In the new post I break down the actual gear stack room by room, presence and light sensors, the KNX bus wiring, dimming and blind actuators, the logic layer (KNX function blocks or Home Assistant), and the keypads and voice bridges that let you override it when you want to. That last layer is for you, not the automation itself.

If you're planning a build or renovation, this is worth reading before you start counting light switches.

Full post in the comments.

03/08/2026

An architecture firm in Poland kept overheating their own office. Big windows, great views, and a floor full of high-power workstations running all day. Their fix wasn't a bigger air conditioner, it was automating the blinds, ventilation and temperature room by room.

Their CFO put it simply afterwards: it's noticeable both in the office's comfort and their energy bills. A few months later, they made automation standard on every project they design for clients. Not because a supplier told them to. Because they used it themselves first.

That's the real business case for KNX. Research from the International Energy Agency puts energy management savings at 10-17% for businesses just from setting targets and tracking usage. Add proper automation on top and building case studies average 34% savings across lighting, heating and cooling. For a small business without a facilities team on staff, that's not a lifestyle upgrade. It's fewer emergency callouts and a lower power bill, month after month.

If you're speccing an office, retail space, clinic or hospitality venue and want the automation treated as an investment with a payback period, not a nice-to-have, let's talk.

31/07/2026

Here we go again. Another smart home provider decided that something that's always been free now needs a subscription.

Samsung's SmartThings quietly announced that its API, the thing that lets platforms like Home Assistant talk to your SmartThings-connected devices, stops being free in October 2026. Individual developers now pay $4.99 a month. If you only use the official SmartThings app, nothing changes. If your setup talks to SmartThings through anything else, you're the one footing the bill just to keep your own hardware working the way it always has.

Home Assistant's own founder called it "yet another cloud paywall."

Here's the part that gets me. When Samsung bought SmartThings back in 2014, the company's own announcement said their goal was "a totally open smart home platform." Twelve years later, they're charging rent on the exact thing that made that true.

This is exactly why I build on KNX. There's no API to paywall, because there's no cloud vendor sitting between your switch and your automation logic in the first place. Every decision gets made once, at commissioning, on hardware from any certified manufacturer. Nobody can reprice that door later because there isn't one.

If a vendor's pricing decision three years from now shouldn't be able to touch your automation setup, that's worth a conversation before the walls close.

Full post in the comments.

30/07/2026

Something I've noticed across enough projects now that I don't think it's a coincidence: nobody owns the middle of a build.

The start has an owner. The designer sets the brief, works out the layout, gets it onto drawings. The end has an owner too, that's when the designer comes back for finishing touches and snagging. What happens in between, the actual months where the building gets built, mostly belongs to no one.

The builder's already running sequencing, budgets, subcontractor logistics and a dozen fires a day. Coordinating how the electrician, the automation integrator and the AV installer work together isn't a small extra task, it's a second job they never signed up for. And the designer isn't in the room for it either, their value is at the two ends, not sitting through months of framing and first fix.

So every trade does their own scope well, mostly blind to everyone else's, at the same time. That's where the rework and the quietly-less-considered result comes from.

I don't have a tidy answer here. Is coordinating the middle a role the industry needs to properly define and pay for on residential projects, the way it already exists on larger commercial builds? Or is it on the main contractor to be resourced for it properly?

Genuinely curious how other people building right now are handling this.

29/07/2026

Apple's smart home hub has been "almost here" since 2021. This week Bloomberg reported something different: three products, including that hub, reportedly landing between October and early next year, not another vague delay.

The details are genuinely impressive: a 7-inch display with facial recognition, an interface that scales as you walk up to it, and support for FaceTime, security monitoring, HomeKit control, and more. It sounds like Apple has finally built the control surface it's been promising for years.

Here's the thing worth knowing before anyone gets too excited about putting one in every room: read its own feature list closely and it calls itself "HomeKit accessory management." That's honest. It's a screen that talks to a system. It doesn't wire your lights, run your HVAC, or hold your security together on its own.

That's exactly what a wired KNX backbone does, quietly, in the background, whether or not Apple's servers are up, your Wi-Fi is behaving, or Siri is having a good day. Build that properly now, and whatever control layer arrives next, this hub included, just plugs in on top.

A great screen is not a substitute for good wiring. If you're planning a build or renovation and want the backbone sorted before the fancy control panels arrive, we should talk.

Just a conversation about what the project needs.

28/07/2026

A question I get from architects a lot: KNX can already switch and dim lights, so why bother adding DALI on top of it?

Here's the honest answer. KNX is brilliant at deciding what the lights should do, tying scenes together with blinds, climate and security on one system. What it was never built to be is a lighting protocol. A standard KNX dimming actuator switches in fixed groups and has no idea what's actually happening at the fixture.

DALI was built specifically for that job. Every driver gets its own address, so a single downlight can be addressed independently, dimming curves are smooth instead of stepping down in visible jumps, and a proper DALI-2 driver can report back if it's failing before anyone notices a light acting up.

That last part matters more than people think. It's the difference between "there's a flickering light somewhere in the hallway" turning into a Saturday afternoon of testing bulbs, versus your integrator already knowing exactly which fitting to check.

Skip the DALI layer to save on the quote and the lights still work. They just never quite do what was actually specified.

Just a conversation about what your project needs.

27/07/2026

BetterBond's national sales head laid out the 2026 property market plainly this year: South African buyers aren't chasing size or fancy finishes anymore. They're chasing resilience. Full energy backup, solar, batteries, inverters, has gone from nice-to-have to non-negotiable. Boreholes and greywater systems are right behind it.

Estate agents are reporting these homes sell faster and for 5 to 10% more, because they reduce a buyer's exposure to municipal failure, load shedding, water restrictions, all of it.

Here's the part I think most sellers are missing. The premium isn't for owning the hardware. Anyone can point at a roof and say there's solar up there. Proving the system actually works, that it holds through an outage instead of just looking good on a spec sheet, is a different conversation entirely, and it's the one a serious buyer wants to have.

Most installations can't have that conversation. Three or four separate systems, three or four apps, no shared record of how the house actually behaves when the power or the water drops.

A KNX installation ties the solar inverter, the battery, the borehole pump and the geyser into one documented system, with months of logged behaviour instead of a sales pitch. That's the difference between a claim and proof, and 2026's buyers are informed enough to ask which one they're getting.

Just a conversation about what your project needs.

Address

8 St Columb Road
Johannesburg

Opening Hours

Monday	08:00 - 05:00
Tuesday	08:00 - 17:00
Wednesday	08:00 - 17:00
Thursday	08:00 - 17:00
Friday	08:00 - 13:00

Telephone

+27825643982

Website

http://www.knxlogic.co.za/

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