"RBM" wrote in message
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"DerbyDad03" wrote in message
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I installed some X10 components today and have some issues.

description of several common X-10 issue snipped

My new toys aren't making me happy!

"Toys" being the optimum word

That's only partly true. X-10 gear has the "potential" to be the backbone
of a highly reliably, very powerful (and best yet, surprisingly inexpensive)
home automation system. Many people use it quite successfully. But not the
way it comes from the factory.

Straight out of the box it's often a confusing, bedeviling, exasperating
experience in: "WHY!!!?" Depending on what you bought, it can be: Why
doesn't it work like they say? Why doesn't it work like I expect it to? Why
doesn't it work at all? Or, the worst of all, why is it smoking like that?

With a little help, you can almost alway find a way to use it out of the box
to turn on or off ONE problem light. X-10, however, scales badly and the
more devices you add, the dicier things get for a number of different
reasons, too detailed to go into here.

The X-10 concept is great. You can turn OFF or ON all the lights in the
house or flash them. There's no faster way for the cops or EMS to find you
when they're running down a street that to look for the house that's
flashing all its lights. It's an attention getter.

Better still, it's cheap because the patent expired and it's managed to
become a standard, with units built by many makers and robust price and
feature competition.

But (and it's a Neicy Nash sized but) it was designed for the electrical
"grid" found in the houses of 1970 when you might not find a single switch
mode power supply outside of a laboratory. Now, every little battery
charger made is a switch mode power supply.

X-10 RF was designed a little later, but essentially for the RF environment
of those days and a lot has changed. They've always lied about their 100 ft
range. Between two perfectly tuned devices, out in the middle of the ocean
away from the radio noise of the big city -- maybe, but X-10 is
mass-manufactured, not hand-tuned. The frequency match between devices is
often quite poor and you can get RF failure in a plaster/lath house in as
little as 10 feet. Hence the name X-10. sarcasm alert - not true fact

To make it a workable solution, as George has suggested, you need to "boost"
the basic specs of X-10. I believe he's using the WGL All Housecode
transceiver.

http://www.wgldesigns.com/

Specifically:

http://www.wgldesigns.com/v572.html

This unit has a far superior RF receiver, compared to stock X-10 gear, and
most importantly allows for connection to an external antenna. X-10's
designs, IIRC, use capacitance-coupled antennas and present a serious shock
hazard if standard attempts are made to improve its (pitiful) range.

Stock X-10 may be enough for a lot of people, but to turn X-10 into a "when
I push the button, I know the light will go out 99% of the time (or better)"
then you also need Jeff Volp's product, the XTB-IIR.

http://jvde.us/xtb_index.htm

This is a repeating amplifier (among many other things) that takes the
average 5V output of the X-10 signal over the powerline and boosts it up to
around 25V. Hence the name XTB (X-10 Transmission Booster - true fact). No
X-10 installation larger than "toy" or "one attic light on a pull chain"
should be without it, but I'm guessing maybe half a million are. With all
the cheap plug-in chargers in the world that leak RF onto the powerlines (or
worse, block it AND the X-10 signal from propagating), it's only a matter of
time before stock X-10 users begin experiencing intermittent "ghost"
failures: those annoying, middle of the night activations that are so
incredibly annoying and have very low SAF. Or it will come in the form of
lights that just refuse to be controlled remotely. Or at all.

With the XTB gear, "I press the button and the light goes on." Anyone with
a twitchy X-10 system knows what a serious endorsement that is. I can find
fault with almost any product, but this one's only fault is that it needs to
be installed in a box next to the main circuit panel and wired to each phase
of the 240VAC service via a tandem breaker. For about 90% of the people
here, though, that's probably not a problem. He's even got gear that can
help without needing serious changes to the main circuit panel.

Disclaimer: No financial interest in either company, just a deliriously
happy user of both. I figure they've saved me over $3,000 in not having to
change over to a more expensive, more limited AND proprietary protocol like
Insteon or Z-wave.

--
Bobby G.