Re: Beginner at X10 - general questions

["Dr John Tankard" <jtankard@xxxxxxx>]

> I personally think it would be very poor design for any system to have
a
> critical dependancy on any one component. HomeVision, Comfort or a PC
> may each be very reliable, but things still fail. Even a low chance of
> coming home and not being able to switch on a light, control the
heating
> or answer the phone is too risky for me. I'm trying to design
everything
> so there is a manual fall back. If for not better reason than as your
> putting it together you can guarantee glitches, and a wife who can't
> switch the light on and run a bath is not a happy wife - voice of
> experience ;-(
>
> My strategy is to have in place manual systems as the first line of
> operation - light switches and a boiler on/off switch. The second line
> of operation is Comfort - if all is working well Comfort is in charge.
> The third tier is the PC, providing a higher level of control over
> Comfort - this has the advantage of a more friendly user interface,
and
> quicker/more powerful programming.
>
> More things may go wrong this way, because I have more interfaces, but
> hopefully the consequences of a device failing will be so small that
> noone (the wife) will notice.
>
>

Ray I agree with much of what you say, my HomeVision system has overall
control, later I will have mister house supervise Home Vision, I recognise
the failure problem so I have a complete set of spare driver chips and my
light control system is optically isolated from the unit anyway, each light
circuit is home run to some key nodes in the house and at that point each
module can be swapped out (at the moment there is a mix of my own fully
singing and dancing ones and some simple SSR's) a swap out will take a
couple of minutes. The heating system is run by a Landis RVP controller
which can also be switched of to allow manual operation. However I have a
old 'Tilly Lamp' filled with oil ready for action. ;-)

John
jtankard@xxxxxxx
Building Links Page http://www.tankard.com/links.htm
Extra links to hotlinks@xxxxxxx please


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