Hi Bob!
I have a HomeMinder that I use every day, and has been in continual use since I bought my first house over a year ago. It controls all my lights on a schedule, and the roller shades in my bedroom. I replaced almost all the wall switches with X-10 switches, and can also control them with a few "control center" banks of RF switches throughout the house, and also have a few motion sensors hooked up, too. I absolutely love it!
I had the same concerns as you do about the overheating IC. If you haven't yet opened it up, let me tell you, the Home Minder is not fun to crack open! inside, all the relevant components are contained inside a shielded metal box that's soldered shut in either four or six places. One you get it open there's a fairly compact circuit board that's solidly attached to the shield. I think the video IC is on the underside of that board, inaccessible without more effort than I cared to put in. I had purchased a heat sink, thermal paste, etc, and was ready to do what I could, but when I finally got it open and saw what I was dealing with I realized I was in over my head and that I'd rather just chance the video IC overheating eventually. I put it in a fairly open location with good airflow, so hopefully it'll stay pretty cool! So far, so good - no issues whatsoever at all! At some point I'll purchase another HomeMinder unit just to have it on standby just in case this one goes bad.
I've got the manual floating around here somewhere but it wasn't of much use in this case. Unfortunately I lost my scanner to a flood so I can't send it to you, I'm afraid! Best of luck if you do try to add some cooling to the unit - let us know how it goes!
P.S. if you set the date to 1996 the days of the week should line up with the months, taking into account that this is a leap year!
