RE: switches, RF, etc

["David Pullen" <dpullen@xxxxxxx>]

I have just been catching up with some of the discussions over the last few
days and thought I would add a few things that may (or may not!) be useful.

If you want to use LD10/11s and you don't want to change light switches you
can use a normal switch. Some are easier to use than others. We have lots
of
Victorian style toggle switches which work really well in this mode. We
effectively use them as momentary switches by toggling on and then off. You
get several advantages - you don't have to change your switches, there is a
much wider range available, it is easy (and cheap!) to reverse anything if
you ever need to. Of course you still don't get any status feedback but
that
is another project - some day....But since the idea is to use the switches
only when the lights are not triggered from some other means it works out
quite well.

I also saw some posts about RF receivers with Homeseer. I replaced all my
TM12s with an mr26a. you can get them pretty cheaply on ebay and they
certainly do speed things up. The US frequency is 310MHz which shouldn't be
used here but there is an excellent mod on the Homeseer forum to convert to
433MHz. You get an additional advantage of extended range with the
modification. Now that I have extended the serial cable with CAT5 to take
the mr26a away from all the equipment, I have found that I have an
effective
range of at least 20m indoors through multiple thick brick walls (without
any of the antenna modifications). All the X10 rf receivers appear to be so
poor that it is pretty easy to improve on them!

HTH someone.

David