Home Automation
Miscellaneous Information
Some interesting tidbits that I've picked up from various places regarding home automation and X-10.Don't tie anything dangerous or critical to your system through X-10. Not only is X-10 not guaranteed reliable (i.e. don't use it to control your heart-lung machine), it has also been mentioned that someone could take a mini controller and plug it into one of your outside outlets and proceed to cause all sorts of problems inside your house. Things like garage door controllers and arming/disarming of security systems should not be trusted to straight X-10 (although plans exist on the net to make the X-10 controlled garage door opener more secure).
If you are considering X-10 and have a modest sized house, you should seriously consider a passive or active phase coupler. What this device does is to electrically join the two electrical phases which exist in most homes so that X-10 signals can pass between them. We had lots of trouble with X-10 in our rental house (no coupler), but almost no problems in our new house with a coupler/blocker. One way to see if this might be your problem is to try using the device you are having trouble with while your electric range or dryer is in operation. These devices use 240 volts and act as couplers while they are operating.
Another item that was mentioned in the previous section was a whole-house blocker. This device sits in your electrical service panel and serves to prevent X-10 signals (as well as electrical noise) from entering your house. If you and your neighbor's houses are connected to the same transformer and you both have X-10, it is quite possible that your systems will interfere with each other. Of course, you can always switch to a different house code, but the blocker will assure that your neighbor will not be able to shut off all your lights when you play your stereo too loud (well, at least not with X-10 anyway).
One thing I wish we had installed more of are inside motion detectors. If you are building a new home, you might want to give serious consideration to installing one in every room to be used for occupancy sensing for lighting control, as well as for security in some areas. The sensors we installed were primarily included for security, but they have proven very useful for lighting control.
The ability to control the thermostat from our home automation system has really worked out well (aside from an initial programming problem which caused us to wake up to a 60 degree house the morning after we activated it). In additional to the functions performed by a standard programmable thermostat, it can be adjusted based on the condition of the security system. For example, if the system is in the AWAY mode (i.e. we are away on vacation), then the thermostat stays at the lower-temperature setting all day long, instead of warming up during the hours that people would normally be present. We are also able to control it from the bedside using the telephone - if you wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep and want to turn up the heat, you don't have to walk downstairs to the thermostat - all you have to do is pick up the phone and punch in a few numbers.
A real dusk/dawn sensor (the Sundowner has been mentioned) is more accurate than any built-in sunrise/sunset calculation - I plan on adding one to our system shortly (probably a hardwired unit attached to the Omni - have to add the 4-input upgrade to the Omni first though). The built-in calculations are relatively accurate, but obviously cannot account for cloudy days.
