Re: Why cling to old X10?

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"RickH" <passport@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1189615039.736323.166490@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

<stuff snipped>

> I've had 2 homes involved with HA over the years, in both I felt I
> needed to be concerned about the next owner and the inevitable home
> inspection process at selling time.  In my first home I did remove the
> X10 stuff as it was not reliable enough, (mostly signal thrashing,
> relay chatter, etc), before home inspection.

I'll be taking the X-10 gear out of this house before I sell it, but not so
much as to save heartaches for the next owner but to either re-use or sell
on E-bay!  The thriving X-10 market on Ebay tells me there's plenty of life
left in X-10. Since I got hold of Jeff Volp's XTB devices, bad signal
strength is a thing of the past.  As for chattering relays, well, it's mass
produced junk from China, what did you expect?  <g>   If it fails, $5 to $20
gets me back in the game and I have another contribution to the junk box.
(-:  I'm just happy, that unlike other Chinese products, it doesn't poison
any of the occupants here with melamine or lead paint.

But it's important to remember and easy to forget that everyone's HA needs
are remarkably diverse.  I want to be able to control every major electronic
doodad in my house via one remote.  So far, not perfect, but close.  X-10's
breadth of remote control interfaces gives me more flexibility that any
other HA system, and I believe that will still be true 10 if not 20 years
from now.  That's not a typical usage, but it's turned out to be largely
possible with X-10 and a little help from other sources.  I suspect yours to
be the more typical HA usage pattern, and so Insteon is far more attractive
to you than it is to me.

>In this home I have about 55 Insteon devices that so far have been 100
>percent reliable.

I assume the 55 devices you describe are mostly lights.  I can't help but
noting that X-10 was pretty much 100 percent reliable when it first came out
20+ years ago.  It was the incredibly expanding nature of the home powerline
network and the advent of the switch-mode power supplies (mostly) that
created so much trouble for X-10.  Had X-10 designers had all the IC's and
new electronic technologies that Insteon designers had access to, I am sure
they would have been able to design a better system.  The fact I have
modules that are 20 years old that still work is a testament to how well the
original X-10 was designed.

The faster the pulses are transmitted, the less vulnerable they are to many
problems that plague the slower X-10 protocol.  The sad part is that it's
obvious that switch-mode PS's *can* be made so as not to interfere with
X-10, but many of them aren't.  That's unfortunately why everyone running an
X-10 installation needs a meter or analyzer to keep it running smoothly
unless in a past life that person was a dog that liked chasing its tail.
(-:

Still, I won't be switching to Insteon any time soon.  There's the very
significant sunk cost of having installed all this gear and learning to turn
lights off by feel even in my sleep.  The XTB has given me the luxury of
waiting until the market shakes out the weaker contenders.

That "stall for time" is important because I don't think all the current
X-10 "heirs apparent" will be around 10 years from now.  I'd hate to buy
into something that would eventually become obsolete, especially if my
house's operation depended on the availability of spares.  Worse, still if
my heirs were faced with selling it, I'll bet an electrician might charge a
pretty penny to restore an HA'ed house to original condition.

I realize my house or even yours wouldn't be as bad as some (anyone remember
the guy with three or four huge central lighting panels with true rat's nest
wiring?)  but we've already seen some of what happens when people buy GELV
houses (GE low voltage) from the 1950's.  I don't think anyone ever paid a
premium for a house with an obsolete HA system.  A penalty for the seller is
more likely.

> These 55 are in the basement alone where there is an elaborate home
> theater with a large number of accent lighting circuits and scenes,
> and an adjoining dance floor disco with more effect lighting.

Dude, where's the party?  (-: I haven't gone Disco'ing since - I can
remember the exact date if the neurons didn't die - wait - wait - November
1978!  When I die, emanating from my grave will be the song that's engraved
there, "uh uh uh uh Stayin' Alive, Stayin' Alive."  Which leads to an even
more interesting and strangely on-topic tangent of "dead ringers" which some
say were people who sat in graveyards to listen for bells attached by
strings to the hands of the recently buried just in case they really weren't
quite dead yet.  In the modern age, we can do it with RF and MP3 players
loaded with the BeeGees.  Now if pulling a string to ring a bell to bring
you back from the grave isn't slick automation, what is?  Now where were we?

> It's a 2 story home and I'll eventually add more Insteon to the main and
> upper floors, and still need a few more in the basement for stage
> drape control, etc.  After using X10 for years I feel confident now I
> would not be sticking the next owner with an unreliable system.

That's commendable.  If it's easy to understand and operate, and it's
reliable, they might even pay a premium for the feature.  But if Smarthome
goes bankrupt (and we've seen far bigger fish than them disappear from the
world - think Pan Am Airways) then you'll be sticking them with something
that they can't get spares for.  That's always a concern with something like
HA because a close or direct lightning strike can destroy a lot of
equipment.  You never know when you'll be suddenly called on to replace half
or more of your installation.

I think I'd be more comfortable with something like Z-wave or Zigbee that
didn't lock the user into a single vendor but they've got a ways to go to
catch up with Insteon reliability.  But low-power RF based installations
have their own boogiemen, and they live in the unforeseeable future, too.
If it's a "you must accept harmful interference" device, you might just end
up having to do just that and replace all your devices with those that work
on a different frequency.

> Although there are a few things I still cant do with Insteon, like
> dawn/dusk detection, but that will come.

And when it does, the Insteon system will be far more attractive to me than
it is now.  There's still nothing that compares with the breadth of
offerings that X-10, from temperature senders to pool controllers to
sprinkler systems to drapery controllers to dawn/dusk sensors to stand-alone
macro controllers to sophisticated control systems like the Ocelot.  I
suspect some contenders will never reach the bar set by X-10 because they'll
just fold up.

My candidates, in order, for bellying up by 2017 are UPB and Z-wave.  I
don't know enough about Smarthome's corporate structure to know if, like so
many other small businesses, they'll experience difficulty when the founders
founder.  But all in all, I think they're a good bet because IMnsHO they
have the greatest understanding of the HA market of all the contenders to
the X-10 throne.

> BTW I am also running 2 UPS systems on my computers and a moderate
> number of CFL's, I have no signal bridge, just 2 RF wall repeaters on the
> main and 2nd floors, I dont use any 24/7 computer control, just a desktop
> application to  program the Insteon network devices occasionally.  I can
> honestly say that I have never experienced a real glitch yet.

I don't doubt that.  The reasons are complex, though, and they include the
Insteon system's RF repeater, primarily, for getting the signals get through
with greater reliability than X-10.  The RF repeater solved a dreadful
problem with X-10, namely repeaters needing to be installed in the main
circuit panel, hopefully by a qualified installer.  As I said previously,
had the X-10 designers been faced with UPS's and CFLs, they might have been
able to design around them.

I'm just happy that I have ways to work around such problems, with Jeff's
XTB earning the top spot as the most important weapon in my "work around"
arsenal.  It's easier to plug in some XTB's and some filters than it is to
yank every switch and module in the house and replace them with Insteon.  A
new house would be a different matter, and I might very well follow in your
footsteps with Insteon when the time comes.

--
Bobby G.