Home automation — not just for McMansions anymore | Part II

Continued from “Home Automation–not just for McMansions anymore | Part I”

Another X10 device I purchased was a bedside controller which operated every light in the house. Before getting the dogs, it was comforting knowing that if I heard a suspicious noise downstairs I could turn the house into Yankee Stadium with the touch of the ALL ON button by my bed.

I found that it could also control macros on my Unix server which would let a single button control a predefined script, or “scene.” For instance, a single button press turned on, and off, my porch lights, the entry light, the hallway light, and the upstairs hall light. I had another setting, “midnight snack,” which turned on a path of lights from the bedroom to the kitchen, dimmed to 30% brightness.

Then I added a controller so I could my downstairs in-wall air conditioner on and off. My plan was to automate my thermostat with motion detectors so the heat would automatically drop to fixed setback temperature if it didn’t sense any movement in the house for one hour. I really got sucked into the X10.

And, yes, you can go crazy with this stuff.

But X10 is a fairly flaky technology. For one thing, it relies on a protocol with an annoying latency issue. Latency is the time it takes for an event to be initiated until the event actually happens. Picture sloppy power steering on a ‘56 Chrysler. In the case of X10, it might take as long as two seconds for a light to respond to a wall switch, at which point, you’ve already hit the button a second time. Sometimes, depending on noise in the power line from a cheap battery charger or the motor on the air conditioner, the light won’t respond at all. Occasionally, the same line noise will turn a light on all by itself.

My second issue with X10 is the quality of the hardware. Despite the steep price tag, X10 devices won’t win any reliability awards. I was typically replacing two or three devices every year. But the benefits clearly outweighed the problems, or at least they did until the Night of the Haunting.

One hot, stormy night, I came home to find my house lights flashing on and off like a Route 1 motel sign. Some controller had malfunctioned in the high humidity and was generating ALL LIGHTS ON and ALL LIGHTS OFF commands in succession. It was spooky to watch and, worse, it took me an hour to find and disable the culprit. I’m surprised that a neighbor didn’t call the fire department but they probably assumed I was just doing something crazy with the lights again.

It was when I decided to go back to the marketplace and find a better technology, which I did. Insteon. I’ll talk more about Insteon next time.

In the meantime, you can read a more thorough explanation of X10 automation on my blog.