Scenes

While the lighting on the stairs was being worked on, we had no lights on the landing. To make it safer going up to bed, we used an RF remote to trigger a appliance module to turn a lamp on in the bedroom. This also had the advantage of being able to turn the light off later without getting out of bed.

The natural extension of this using the new X10 lighting is to have the same “On” button triggering a sequence of light settings - a “scene”. So now the “On” signal triggers a simple sequence of commands:

x10 turn l_landing on
x10 turn l_bed_2 on
x10 turn l_bath on

They set the scene for going up to bed. Later, the “Off” signal triggers a second sequence:

x10 turn j1 lightsoff
x10 turn l1 lightsoff

That is the X10 magic necessary to turn off any lights we happened to leave on anywhere in the house. This is great! No more going back to the bottom of the stairs to switch of the hall light.

It’s great to see how even simple things like this are coming together. Things should really pick up now that the first phase of electrical work is coming to an end. (Phase two will be the new fan/light for node 0 and phase three will be the en-suite electrics - i.e. underfloor warming, demister, fan, etc.)