RE: Re: Must-haves for the livingroom

["Marcus Warrington" <marcus.warrington@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I had a couple of these (off eBay) and wan't very impressed, ended up
uninstalling them and getting rid.



They are very noisy when operating and are just really a motor with a
mechanical toggle switch (a little like the old circular heating timers
with the little blue and red tabs). You have to use a X10 appliance
module (with their transformer plugged into it) and each time you turn
ON the appliance the motor will start winding the cord. Its tops either
when you issue an X10 OFF (i.e. disconnect power) or when the motor
flicks the adjustable stop point. At both these points the polarity of
the motor is swapped so that the next X10 ON (power applied) will wind
the motor in the opposite direction. This means you have to keep track
of the last direction and you can't issue a discrete open curtains or
close curtains.



Another issue I had was that I was using them to open/close a couple of
roller blinds in a double window, and the STOP point of each would drift
so it was impossible to set an exact stop point so both blinds opened or
closed by the same amount. In fact they used to drift so much that after
a couple of open/close operations the blinds would start to hit the
window sill and ruche up



I plan on (eventually) using some of the simplyautomate roller blind
motors instead...



Marcus

________________________________

From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Jonathan Shaw
Sent: 17 May 2007 11:22
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_d] Re: Must-haves for the livingroom



--- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx <mailto:ukha_d%40yahoogroups.com>
, "Keith
Finnett" <groups@...> wrote:
>
> What curtain openers have you selected? I'm need some for my
dedicated
> cinema room that use IR and/or 12V trigger....
>
None yet - just speced a cable to switch them, so I am assuming mains
powered.
The only 12V one I've seen is this from Simply Automate:
http://tinyurl.com/yuyxza <http://tinyurl.com/yuyxza>
As it is 12V not sure why it is not CE approved?
When I looked at this 6 months ago this looked like the most cost
effective option.

Has anyone used them?

HTH
Jon





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