I picked up my first X10 stuff in the 90's when shopping on the World Wide Web was akin to the Wild West. I have 90% of the original items I purchased and for all intents and purposes, they still work. The problem is the amount of junk we now have in our home plugged into power strips and so forth. I am not an electrician and I'm not testing signal strength, etc, I simply have always had 2 RF Transceivers and I positioned them in various plugs in my home until the lights turned on, and turned off...and stayed that way. For probably 18 years all was right with the world. Except when you plugged in Christmas Lights or moved something to a different socket in a different room, then...well.....move that transceiver around.
But the past few years have been problematic at best. I believe one of my original transceivers died, half the lights stopped responding to my "Add a Keypad" flat adhesive-backed keypads I use to control two separate floors and blocks of lights on each floor. I plugged in a temporary "small format" transceiver while I wait for the RF501 (?) replacement to arrive, and it helped but not 100%. Now I have some lights that refuse to turn on (no signal) and I have others that randomly turn themselves off...and one that randomly turns itself on.
Obviously this won't stand, and I am hoping that having 2 of the larger transceivers (which I believe prevent ghosting of signals) again will alleviate the problem.
But truth is, this is a sloppy fix/band aid at best. One of my lights no longer receives the on/off signal on the floor where all of the others do, and its the one that is closest to the small 3 button (plus dimmer) keypad (Cr2032 powered) and one of the two tranceivers. in other areas of the house, lights are turning on and off and I believe this is due to having exactly 1 motion detector that turns on a light in a room when you enter it auto-magically.........again I think a ghosting/repeating signal.
I did pick up a couple of spare noise-isolators that I put on some power-strips that don't pull a lot of power, that seemed to help.....is the solution to add those to power strips when necessary? I mean the whole x10 thing is a bit rube-goldberg in my home, but I can't deny that replacing everything with smart-bulbs that can be controlled from space is not my ideal solution.
I literally want to turn lights on and off and having the little CR2032 powered switches on the walls blended seamlessly into my home, but now those will really only trigger 'some' of the lights, enough to find a larger 16 button remote control and trigger the rest of them. And even those, sometimes, I need to re-position my body, etc. I do have a passive coupler on my dryer that I stopped using years ago because I found it seemed to make zero difference with it on or off, and on it would get and stay warm.
Anyhow that's my story, suggestions or mockery both accepted with thanks.
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Topic: X10 madness - ancient hardware finally giving me grief (Read 84 times)