In the previous post, I described two of the three significant X10 problems we had when setting up our home automation system. This post will cover the third problem, latency. Although all our lights have conventional switches (well, momentary switches in conventional locations), we use a lot of X10 RF Remotes and X10 Motion Sensors to trigger lights and other devices. Initially, we used a TM13U RF Transceiver Module that receives the X10 RF signals and converts them in to X10 powerline signals.

I’ve written two posts about some of my favourite home automation features and both happened to use X10. So, I thought I should probably mention the significant problems we had with X10 and how we solved them. We had three significant problems. The first was noisy devices preventing the X10 powerline signals reaching some parts of our house. Initially, we attempted to resolve the noise problems by using X10 FM10 Plug in Filter Modules or X10 FD10 DIN-mounted Filter Modules.

Lighting is an important aspect of our automated home. Most of our lights are controlled via either X10 DIN-mounted Lamp Modules or X10 DIN-mounted Appliance Modules. (Some are RGB LED lamps but I’ll cover them in a later post.) Although I am a morning person, I still need a little help waking up in the morning. My lovely children help a bit but being able to have the lights gradually brighten to full brightness when it is time to get up helps a lot, particularly in the winter.

It has been a while since I wrote a blog entry so I thought I’d write a few posts to describe the current state of our house (with respect to home automation, not the washing up or the mess made by my two lovely children). I’ll start with a few posts covering the most useful features of our automated home. The most important device we’ve automated is the kettle. We “prime” the kettle after making a cup of tea by filling it, switching it on but turning it off at the mains (with an X10 Appliance module).

We started having trouble with our Harmony dimmer a couple of days ago. It was working fine from the switch and but not responding to X10 commands. We tried resetting it, but no change. Then we noticed that the kettle wasn’t responding as reliably as usual, and the curtains also seemed to be a bit slow to respond. Not good when we’re planning to add more X10 devices. Today we decided to try unplugging the electrical items that we had recently added to the house and see if any of those made a difference.