Re: Smarthome Lamplinc and local control

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

"Richard S. Smith" <rss@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Dave Houston <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> It is disappointing that they did not design it to disconnect the
>> transmitter section, when idle, to eliminate its loading of the powerline.
>
>It doesn't make much sense to me either, given that many of us
>rely on X10 for motion detection, RF interface, thermostat
>control, computer control, and many other things that Insteon
>doesn't do yet, and you are just expected to start migrating to
>Insteon when they don't have replacements for anything except the
>lighting control (and even that's not complete yet).  Then as you
>start doing this you may see your X10 components start to behave
>marginally due to signal attenuation.

They have many of those coming by years end. I think they got a bit
overwhelmed by the demand.

Reed relays are cheap and have lifetimes in the billions of cycles. I wish
they had used them in their designs to disconnect the idle transmitters.

>I'll be the first to admit that X10 is not perfect but it's a
>well-understood technology and it still has the most hardware
>available for it.  My humble opinion is that the choice between
>X10 and Insteon is just a choice between one can of worms and
>another.

My recommendation was that there's really no need to switch for those who
already have a lot of X-10 and understand how to deal with X-10's
idiosyncracies. However, for anyone just getting started with HA, I think
Insteon is clearly the way to go simply because it is a fast, two-way
protocol that eliminates guessing about the state of a device and the ICON
line of devices is priced about as aggressively as X-10.