My Old House
Been working…

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last few days. I’ve been very busy with my day-job.

Not much to talk about with regards to the house right now. But now that I’m off-shift for the next five days, I’m sure I’ll have a few things to do. But here’s all the news I can tell you so far:

1) With regards to the air conditioning and the thermostat. I have basically learned that the air temperature in the room with the thermostat in it is about 3 degrees warmer than what the thermostat SAYS it is at any given moment. That inaccuracy seems to have been a large part of my problem in understanding how this thing works. Now, that doesn’t explain why that one day, the A/C would run for two minutes, then shut off for 11 minutes, even though the inside fan was running continuously. But whatever problem that was has disappeared. The air conditioning has been running for the past few days without any problems whatsoever. (Thankfully!) Weather forecast says tomorrow starts a pattern of cooler weather. So today might be the last day we have to use it this year anyways… and I really don’t think it’s all that necessary even today.

2) Neighborhood news !! There was an article all about the growing desire for improving our neighborhood in Saturday’s issue of the “Independence Examiner”! The article was primarily about the “Neighbors of Winner Road Association” (of which we are new members)… and how they fixed up a particular bus stop shelter that has its origins back in the days of the trolley! You can read this article here!

3) Security: Well, we still haven’t heard back from the police officer who left a message for us a few weeks ago regarding the break-in and theft from our garage back in mid-August. We’ve left several messages for him to call us, but that hasn’t happened yet. All we know is they suppossedly caught the guy, he’s in his 40′s, and he lives in an apartment complex just a stone’s-throw away from here.

I haven’t written a thing about it here until now… but a couple guys at work got me interested in Home Automation. Specifically, they gave me some of their older equipment and advised me to try the 30-day trial of some Home Automation software called Homeseer. (www.homeseer.com) The folks on the Homeseer message boards have been a big help, as have my coworkers.

At this time, I’ve got a floodlight wired off of the garage to light up the area where the break-in occurred. There are two motion sensors slightly-hidden in the backyard that monitor this area and trigger the lights. I hope to put one or two more motion sensors back there. The sensors are small and use radio beams to send signals to electronic relays…. which then forward the message into the house to my computer. The computer then sends out a signal to turn on the light. When the motion sensors haven’t detected movement back there in a certain amount of time, they send a signal again and the computer turns the light off.

I have a similar system of 2 motion sensors rigged up to the pre-existing back-porch flood light.

All of this stuff works off of a type of technology called “X10″. (You may have heard of their cameras via online ads.) X10 technology typically uses the wiring of your home to send signals between the various pieces. However, I’m finding that, with this old house, I’m much better off relying on radio signals. Fortunately, there are several modules that can convert X10 signals to radio signals and broadcast those around.

However, so far, I’ve experienced problems with bad sensors, delayed reactions among the lights, motion sensor positioning problems, and problems where the computer sends the signal to turn something on… and it doesn’t happen. Plus some of my “events” seem to fire off at wrong times.

I’ve got one sensor in the house that basically determines if it’s light or dark outside and triggers the motion sensor / flood-light system accordingly. So, if it just gets really overcast, the sensor-light system becomes “active”… instead of just doing so between sunset and dawn.

While I find the technology very amazing, I’m also finding it to be not very reliable, hard to troubleshoot, and pricey. (I’ve purchased a few modules from Automated Outlet. But Radio Shack has some too.)

I’m probably going to go purchase some parts today to attempt to build two radio antennas. I want to extend the radio range of one of my receivers. Not sure which antenna design will work better, so I’m building them both. To be honest, this whole Home Automation thing tends to be taking up too much of my time, as I really want to get this stuff working properly and its taking a lot of time to debug !!!

I’ve ordered a special X10 switch for the garage. One problem we have is that our Sears Garage Door openers only keep their lights on for about 60 seconds! So, by the time my wife Terry gets out of the car, the light shuts off ! I figure with a couple of motion sensors in the garage and one of these X10 switches in place on the garage’s 8 banks of flourescent lights, I can easily automate things so that when you open the garage, the flourescent lights all turn on… and stay on for a much longer period of time!

One nice thing about all of this X10 stuff is that, since I’m a computer geek and this stuff interfaces with my computer, I can rig it to send me alerts whenever something happens ! And I wear a Timex Pager Watch, so I can set things up so that those alerts can pages on my wrist !!

Gotta run… lots to do today….

Thanks!

-= Dave =-