Re: is x10.com dead?

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> If I were to switch today, I'd be giving up a ton of tangible benefits for
a
> marginal increase in reliability.  No way.

That's just it, the reliability difference wasn't marginal.  It was 50% (at
best) versus 100%.

> Perhaps the plethora of oddball electronic goodies represents a hostile
> enviroment for X-10 and you need Lutron the way the US Army needs EMD
> hardened gear.

The point is if X-10 wasn't such a shitty product it wouldn't HAVE trouble
with this sort of thing.  Blaming the billions of other devices being made
worldwide is NOT a realistic excuse.

> I dunno.  Try to buy an 8-track from Ebay.  Now type in X-10.  For a
> plaything, it's got awfully deep penetration.

Ubiquity on eBay isn't much of a sign.  Statistically anything's possible,
realistically, however, X-10 is shite.

> Not for you, but they did for her and for me and they worked quite nicely
> compared to what she had been dealing with.  Again, a house that had
little
> more than a single VCR in the living room and not even a cordless phone.

Which is doubtless not representative of the typical modern household.

> You may also have power problems. Spikes and sags and power blinks don't
> seem to agree with the modules, either.  I don't disagree that X-10 has
> sucked for you, but by the same token, you should acknowledge that it
> appears to work for well for a lot of people, especially those who know
and
> can work around its well-known weaknesses.

I've seen this trouble is no less than 4 residences, each with otherwise
completely reliable electrical service.  Graphs from the UPS have show it as
such.  As for "should" that's baloney.  I'm sick of seeing people being
suckered into using an aggravatingly useless technology.

> I depend mostly on the RF gear.  The CM11A has voltage issues that I could
> never get around.  It also has other problems that make it unsuitable and
> yet ActiveHome and others use it as the main X-10 controller because
there's
> little else.  Again it just shows that with proper attention to
> configuration you can really minimize the heartache.

Again, that's like saying you have to plan your route out ahead of time in
your car because it might randomly just shut down because the color of the
bushes on one street weren't right.  A device for controlling AC-line
devices should never have this sort of chaotic unreliability.

> When you use them, do you set the outside in a baggie?

No, they control the circuit from inside.  No temperature or moisture
issues.  And aren't stored in the hot attic either.

The fact that they're cheap doesn't justify their aggravation.  Having to
keep buying them, at this rate of two each year, is ridiculous.  Especially
for devices that see two cycles each day for about 2 months!

> But Bill, you just told us "And with all the devices I've got here that's
no
> small claim."  I just don't believe that your house represents John Q.
> Public's typical dwelling - not for a moment! :-)

Over time I've used them in simple setups and they still fail.  While I may
be using more today that I have in the past, I've certainly used them in
what would be considering typical situations.  How many times do we see
someone new come to the newsgroup and being led down the "filter the crap
outta everything" nonsense path?

> That's what I had to do to increase my reliability from perhaps 75% to
95%.
> It's not a bandaid, it's a analytical way to deal with the reality of
> powerline devices that are more and more likely to interfere with the X-10
> signal.

Ah, here we get back to an important point, X-10 does not represent what's
possible with powerline control.  Systems like Echelon have done it reliably
for quite a while.  X-10 has never been reliable and people should give it a
wide berth.

> I think you aggravate more easily than I do.  It's hard to normalize data
> like that.  We want different things from our HA systems.

Well, excuse the insult, but you've decided that wallowing in the random
misery is tolerable.  I've chosen otherwise.  I know it doesn't sound very
nice but honestly, too many geeks keep putting up with this crap and
apologizing for it.  Enough already.

-Bill Kearney