Jeff Thies wrote:
On 10/25/2010 11:26 AM, John wrote:
On Oct 25, 10:26 am, "Bob wrote:
Jeff Thies wrote:
I've been redoing my house and I'm thinking this is a good
time to consider some home automation. I notice that there is a
slew of options, upb, Insteon, Z Wave, among others.

The price per switch, from what I can tell, seems high. What is
reasonable and doable? Or is this not quite there yet?

comp.home.automation is an excellent place to consult.

I looked at that group and saw 3 threads for October and was thinking
it didn't get much traffic. I'll give it another look.

Going back into the past, there should be lots more.



This question has been
asked many times there, so searching in google groups should find
many answers.

I had X10, and moved to Insteon, so I can comment here on those two.
X10 is neat and cheap, and you can get controllers to do almost
anything.

That is a big plus.

Unfortunately, it suffers from reliability issues -- the
more you put in, the less reliable it gets. I've since moved to
Insteon. As far as that goes, it seems to work quite a bit better,
though there's still some glitches in the key-pad-lincs that I wish
they would fix (for example, if I turn on a light downstairs, the
keypadlinc upstairs doesn't detect that I did it. So to turn off the
light from upstairs, I have to press the button once to turn the
light on again, and a second time to turn it off; not a huge deal,
but annoying. Also, certain buttons are always dedicated so you
can't set it up exactly how you'd like).

I will say that my products (bought from Smarthome), while expensive
do have a quality feel to them. With the cheap X10 products, you
turn on a lamp and get this loud clunking sound, and the light turns
on abruptly.

X10 Lamp modules don't clunk, and can be dimmed. But they start from max
brightness when turned on.


I see what you mean. It would seem like this would be the time for
automation and I can find a lot of oddball uses from controlling audio
to monitoring my solar stuff. But, I think I'll do the little bit of
stuff I want (kitchen overhead light controls) and leave the rest for
later.
I'm thinking all this could be interfaced with a smart phone or
laptop or iPAD. Apparently not quite yet.

There have been X10 telephone responders in the past at least. They may still be
made.
X10 can certainly be controlled from computers.