Im moving house in 6 weeks to our latest project (total conversion of a barn to a house), we're leasing out the current one to a tennant, and as a "bonus" ive told them Ill leave the 3k of x10 devices in there. So happily I won't need a cm11 for much longer and the new house is going to be a x10 free zone. Oh bliss, no more reboots, no more lockups, no wondering if any modules will randomly fail this week. I guess I will miss that ******** pause for a second or more while the wireless receiver comes out of (mandatory) power save mode, and the little thrill of if the lights are actually going to work on that occasion and all that pushing of buttons to reprogram the light switches when its gone wonky yet again.
On the further plus side, when the tenant gets sick of it (I reckon 6 months), we're just going to pay a electrician to rewire the house totally to conventional switches. Since it already had a totally new wiring install for the x10, I reckon Ive wasted what, about 10 grand on x10's crappyness? And the only part of the home control system that has worked flawlessly since the day the solder dried is my totally homebrew underfloor heating system, which I wrote my own software for and soldered together myself using a serial network of ds1820's and a parallel port switch relay box and a old pentium class laptop , which ironically was also the cheapest part of the entire system :/
Now, Im responsible for all the wiring design and install in the new place, so far Ive just ran in 6 lengths of cat5 cabling and 2 low loss coax runs between the house and outbuildings and put some proper 2u commercial patch panels in shallow cabinets. I really want to put some extra cabling in at first fix time to cater for the new house having some sort of home automation (but obviously, hell would have to freeze over before I made the mistake of buying x10 stuff again) but funds are not there for the actual components (nor is my trust , any potential system will have to be tested first hand this time round).
So any suggestions? We have free hand to put in what we like re PTT and data cabling, but the electrical stuff must conform to the standards for Consuel (french electrical regs), but consuel allows you to run in extra dark cabling and putting it live once the consuel is obtained...
So what would you pull in if you had a blank canvas? fibre everywhere? or just lots of coax and devices to convert everything to tcp/ip streams (we like tcp/ip, since Im a unix programmer by trade).
On the further plus side, when the tenant gets sick of it (I reckon 6 months), we're just going to pay a electrician to rewire the house totally to conventional switches. Since it already had a totally new wiring install for the x10, I reckon Ive wasted what, about 10 grand on x10's crappyness? And the only part of the home control system that has worked flawlessly since the day the solder dried is my totally homebrew underfloor heating system, which I wrote my own software for and soldered together myself using a serial network of ds1820's and a parallel port switch relay box and a old pentium class laptop , which ironically was also the cheapest part of the entire system :/
Now, Im responsible for all the wiring design and install in the new place, so far Ive just ran in 6 lengths of cat5 cabling and 2 low loss coax runs between the house and outbuildings and put some proper 2u commercial patch panels in shallow cabinets. I really want to put some extra cabling in at first fix time to cater for the new house having some sort of home automation (but obviously, hell would have to freeze over before I made the mistake of buying x10 stuff again) but funds are not there for the actual components (nor is my trust , any potential system will have to be tested first hand this time round).
So any suggestions? We have free hand to put in what we like re PTT and data cabling, but the electrical stuff must conform to the standards for Consuel (french electrical regs), but consuel allows you to run in extra dark cabling and putting it live once the consuel is obtained...
So what would you pull in if you had a blank canvas? fibre everywhere? or just lots of coax and devices to convert everything to tcp/ip streams (we like tcp/ip, since Im a unix programmer by trade).
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