Adventures with X-10

So the X-10 technology has been around for what seems like couple of decades. It lets you control household electrical devices over the power line. It's fairly expensive if you buy it in stores (like Lowe's or Radio Shack) but there's a web site www.x10.com that promotes this stuff and frequently offers special deals with deep discounts. So I've bought a bunch of this stuff to find out how useful it is and to see whether tying it to the Internet results in anything cool. I haven't done that much with it so far, but mostly this is because I actually haven't found too many applications for it.

Remote Control

So far, the most useful application of X-10 in my home has been to let me turn on and off the basement lights from upstairs. So if I leave them on accidentally I don't have to go downstairs (in the cold) to turn them off. The basement lights are just bare light bulbs (actually some of them are floodlamps) mounted on the joists of the floor above. I used three or four X-10 ``socket rockets'' (again, from x10.com) which are small off/on controllers that fit between the socket and the light bulb. Then there's a battery-powered switch glued to the wall upstairs with double-sided tape. The battery-powered switch transmits a radio signal to a transceiver that's plugged in to the power line, and the transceiver relays the signal over the power line to the socket rockets. The socket rocket is nice because it's relatively small so it will fit in most light receptacles. The downside is that it's not dimmable, but for this application it doesn't matter.

Unfortunately, all but one of the socket rockets eventually died. They do not appear to be able to handle the heat from a floodlamp (even though it is within the wattage). I ended up replacing them with ordinary lamp socket controllers. Hopefully those will be more robust.

Dimmable Lights

I also have my living room lamps plugged into Lamp Controllers. Then there is a big universal remote control that lets me control the lamps (and any other X-10 devices I have), along with the TV, VCR, videodisc player, etc. It's nice if you sit down to a movie to be able to adjust the lighting without having to get up.

Fan Control

I tried to use X-10 to control a small fan in my bedroom. I wanted to have some air circulation in there (sometimes I sleep better if there's a breeze blowing) but sometimes the fan gets too cold or noisy and I want to be able to turn it off or on without getting out of bed. X-10 seemed perfect for this. However, I have not been able to get the Appliance Controller to work reliably with the fan (and have tried three different ones). Apparently the fan interferes with the X-10 signal. It might help to put an isolation transformer between the fan and the Appliance Controller, but this is expensive and I haven't tried it yet.

Remote Indicators

Another idea was to have indicators (upstairs) which would let me know that I have clothes sitting in the washer or dryer (downstairs). Ideally there would be sensors in the appliances, but for a first step at this I thought I would just have switches downstairs next to the washer and dryer (turn them on when I put clothes in, turn them off when I remove the clothes), and small lamps upstairs controlled by those switches. Sure it's kind of expensive, but it's nice because it's mostly built with off the shelf technology. But when I tried to use little 110v neon panel lamps for the indicators, I found that both the Lamp Controllers and the Appliance Controllers leaked enough current to keep the neon lamps brightly lit even when switched off. I ended up using incandescent night lights (I think they have about a 10w bulb). I wanted something smaller, but they do work okay.

Observations

X-10 technology in its current state seems fairly inflexible. The Lamp and Appliance modules have too many arbitrary constraints (e.g. won't work with small lamps or fans). The various input devices also have annoying constraints in that you can't individually assign each switch to a particular X-10 code and for the devices that can actually generate any code it can still be cumbersome to do so.