House control

At the end of the 1990's I spent a lot of time away from the house so I decided to install some features to deter burglaries. I installed motorised curtains at 2 of the main windows and timer switches on a number of lights. These were very successful as even a few of my neighbours didn't realise the house was often empty.

In 2001 I started renovations and an extension to the house. I used this as the opportunity to "build in" useful features. A large number of lights are now not switched locally but the power feed and switch wire are both taken back to the "control room". This increases the quantity of wiring but makes remote control much easier.

The switching in the control room is done via either an AD10 or LD11 X-10 appliance or lamp module.

This picture shows the meter board in my server room with 5 X10 lamp modules and 11 X10 appliance modules

The X10 interface to mains uses a CM12U connected to a serial port.

I also have a MS13e motion sensor that interfaces via a TM12U

I have used a number of different software pacakges over the years to control the X10 modules. For a few years I used HomeDeamon but in the end the annoyances outweighed its advantages. I am now using MisterHouse but it took me a long time to work out just what it was all about and even longer to make it do what I wanted. There are other areas I would like to customise like the web interface but everytime I start to work on it I realise why I stopped last time.

So I am still looking for the right package for me. Maybe I should try to write something myself but I'm not sure my coding skills are good enough.