XTB, reliablity, etc.

[craft.brian@xxxxxxxxx]

I know this topic has been flogged to death, but here goes.

I've had some x10 gear for a few years. As everyone knows, it's not
very reliable. I've spent some time experimenting and debugging, trying
to improve the performance. Unfortunately, however much I twiddle with
filters and what-not, it's never very reliable.

I realized a few months ago exactly why that is. The fundamental
problem with the notion of fiddling with x10 filters, boosters, and
meters "until it works" is that it imagines the home power distribution
network as something that is static, or nearly static. If it's static,
you identify the noise sources, the signal sinks, and what-not, and you
compensate. But this doesn't really work.

It doesn't work because the power network changes constantly. As a
typical American household we have dozens of electronic appliances, and
things get plugged and unplugged every day. Laptops, shavers, mixers,
toy ovens, vacuums. Electronic items get purchased and sold regularly.
Every day, at any moment, in any room, on any circuit with outlets,
someone may plug in a laptop, or a vacuum, or a boombox, or a baby
monitor, or who knows what, and abruptly the x10 signal distribution
has changed. Some light switch stops working. Why? Well.. that could
take hours to debug. And the solution doesn't generalize. It doesn't
prevent the NEXT signal failure, when someone plugs something else in
on a different circuit. It may even depend on permutations, like a
boombox here and a noisy ballast there. There are literally thousands
of permutations of things plugged in and things turned on, any number
of which may disrupt x10 signalling.

SO... my question: To the people who seem to be reasonably successful
with tweaking this stuff (I'm thinking of Jeff Volp and others), how do
you deal with this? Do you carefully monitor what gets plugged in? Do
you live alone, as opposed to in a house with several other people who
might plug things in? Is there some other secret to tweaking x10 so it
works even when six different things are plugged in over the course of
a day?

I just saw the XTB page for the first time, and all the gushing reviews
about how this solves everything, or nearly everything. On closer
inspection, though, it seems to more or less confirm that power line
transmission basically doesn't work. The XTB boosts the power of an RF
transponder. So to build out with XTB, you basically have to move
everything to RF. It doesn't help with other x10 signal sources, like
wired controllers. And, if you have several plug-in x10 signal sources,
you need an XTB, at $80, for each one. So you really do have to move
everything to RF, or dump $80 more for every device that's going to
generate x10 signals (in which case you could spend it on some
higher-end technology instead of x10).

Unfortunately, RF isn't a great choice for me either, because metal
lathe in some of the walls leaves RF shadows around the house.