- Posted on
Tue Feb 05, 2019 4:16 pm
-
rlesperance
offline
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- Posts: 333
- Joined: Dec 01, 2004
- Location: Québec, Canada
Thanks for your suggestions ...
I have been with X10 for 27 years. All my house's 5000 square feet is wired and planed to use wall transmitters and LM465 modules located just beside my electrical panel. I have ±35 wall transmitters and ±80 modules/devices (±80 different addresses) and all this stuff is supervised with Indigo on my iMac
For many, X10 is a legacy system with reliability problems. For many, noise over the line or signals from the neighbors's X10 system seems to be a big issue. For me, since I live in the country, neighbor signals are not problematic. Modules and wall transmitters are mostly reliable. Over all those years, I must have replaced only 10 wall transmitters and 10 LM465 modules.
Over time, I have installed filters on a few of my devices, fixing some persistent issue like TV set and computer noise. The one and only problem that I can report is that a few times a year a signal does not go through. I can see the signal sent on my Indigo 's event window but the light/circuit does not answer. The wall transmitter's signal does not seem to go through. When that occurs, my actual work around is to close the electric panel's main switch for a few seconds. Upon opening, the problem disappears until the next time. I don't really know the source of the problem, but that occurs once in a while. Average, over a year, this kind of inconvenience can occur 10 times at most .
As with most technology product, they are never compatibility and issue free. They handle so many tasks and purposes and are connected to so many alien devices/bulbs/controls that being compatibility and issue free is an impossible mission.
Home automation system have been flooding the market for a few years now. More since the introduction of many mainstream product like Alexa, GoogleHome and Apple'sHomePod. There's also Insteon that have been there for a while, Lutron's Caseta and Leviton's Vizia and many others. Probably many of these system are still not yet matured products.
So what's my question ? Since changing a system is money and effort costly, I would like to change for a really better product, a product that is 100% reliable and that will not move me to another problematic universe. Changing one problem for another is not interesting even if it means to migrate to a newer, spicier and more sexier product.
Since many of those product can still have many reliability and compatibility issue or that could be out of the market in a couple of years, I am worried to cary on all this upgrade. Is any of these new system so interesting that it is worth it to migrate ? Migrating all my stuff will be expensive and labor intensive .
Is it really worth it ?