Private houses and estates · Mauchline, Ayrshire

Ballochmyle Estate, Mauchline: a show home’s Control4 system rescued, rebuilt and kept running

A developer’s show home was sold with a Control4 system that nobody supported. When another trade unplugged it, the new owners called Lairds. We stripped it out, tested every cable, rebuilt the rack and have maintained the house ever since.

Since then

Monitored and maintained by Lairds

The brief

The house on the Ballochmyle Estate, outside Mauchline, was built as the show home for a new development. The developer had installed a Control4 system to show buyers what a technology-enabled house could do: whole-house audio, video distribution, lighting, the lot. The house sold on that promise, the developer went out of business, and so did the company that had installed the system. The owners were left with a house full of equipment and nobody to call.

It ran for a while. Then an electrician wiring a new hot tub in the garden went through the network to get power out, unplugged what was in the way and did not put it back. The Control4 processor failed, nothing in the house worked, and the owners rang Lairds.

What we did

The first job with any inherited system is finding out what is actually there. The equipment had been pushed into a wardrobe with no layout, no labelling, no airflow and no way to get at it. Nothing was documented. We started from the cabling rather than the boxes: an audit of every run in the house, the network equipment and the broadband provision, with damaged cables re-terminated and every wire labelled and drawn up. The odds of everything failing at once are low, so we suspected power before anything else, and that proved right: the hot tub installation had taken the network apart and killed the processor with it.

With the infrastructure back in order, the equipment came out of the wardrobe and into a purpose-built AV rack with power management and conditioning, laid out so that anyone can see what is what. The Control4 core was replaced and the system reinstated, with the software configured so that it could take updates and grow, which the demo installation had never allowed for. A Zappiti media server went in for the family’s films, distributed through the house over a Pulse-Eight matrix, and a new television that had never been part of the original design was brought under Control4 by obtaining its codes from the manufacturer, which took longer than it sounds.

Since then the system has been upgraded to Control4’s Core processors, and IP CCTV has been added so that the owners can see the house from anywhere through the Control4 interface. We monitor the network and keep it secure from outside, and we are the people who answer the phone when something changes.

The result

A house that works, on a system the owners can rely on, with the infrastructure documented as part of the property’s records. That documentation is a principle for us rather than a courtesy: the wiring in a house is part of the building, it should be recorded like the drainage and the electrics, and it adds value when the house is sold. The Ballochmyle house has been maintained by Lairds for years now, which is the outcome an inherited system rarely gets.

The house

What went in

• Control4 Core-3 controller (upgraded from the original processor)
• Triad multi-room power amplifier and audio matrix switch
• Triad loudspeakers
• Binary media over IP video distribution
• Araknis router and 24-port switch, monitored through OvrC
• Control4 retrofit lighting
• Zappiti media server and Pulse-Eight matrix
• IP CCTV viewed through the Control4 interface
• Purpose-built AV rack with power management and conditioning

A modern mansion, Ayrshire

Lighting, distributed audio and control across a large family home

Inherited a system nobody supports?

A house bought with a control system and no installer behind it is more common than you would think. We will audit what is there, tell you what it needs, and take it on. Control4, Lutron, or something else entirely.