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X10 is a powerline protocol which lets X10-enabled devices communicate with each other over your household wiring.

An X10 device could be as simple as a remote control for an existing entry way light switch or it could be a complex network of X10 devices remotely controlled by a PC which automatically sets lighting schemas, waters the lawn, sends a text message, feeds the cats, whatever, based on the time of day or some other external event.

Graphic courtesy of X10-store.com home automation.

I was introduced to X10 by a film maker friend who had a weekend house in upstate NY. On Friday nights, when he was about an hour away from arrival, he popped open his cellphone, "called" his house, typed in a code and a few commands and, presto, the X10 thermostat in the house was reset from 50 degrees to 72 degrees and the hot water heater was turned on. When he got to the end of the long, dark dirt road to his house he used the cellphone again to turn on the outside spot lights. His house would even call him if the X10 security system was triggered or if the inside temperature dropped below 45 degrees.

To say the least, this really appealed to my geeky side. I had to have it.

My installation isn't nearly as ambitious as his, although with the diverse assortment of X10-compatible devices available it's limited only by your imagination. You could, for instance, install X10 solenoids to close the living room blinds when the temperature in the room rises above 78 degrees or an X10 moisture sensor in your tomato garden to tell another X10 device in your micro-irrigation system to get to work. There's even an X10 device that plays the digitized sound of a pair of nasty, snarling dogs in response to an X10 motion sensor.

About 80% of my household lighting is under X10 control. From my Linux box I can turn them on and off and even dim them remotely. It also means that that they can be automated further by having them run under Unix's cron scheduler. For instance, my house "knows" when it's thirty minutes before sundown in my locality and turns on the porch lights, the entry way light and the upstairs sconce. At midnight, it kills the outside lights, the accent lighting and dims the entry and upstairs hallway lights by 50%. It also makes sure I turned off the garage and basement lights by sending them an "off" signal.

Next to my bed I have a whole-house X10 controller. When I hit the sack I don't have to worry about whether or not I left a light on in the house. I just hit the ALL OFF button and X10 kills everything for me. Similarly, if I were to hear a noise downstairs I could hit ALL ON and light up the house like the Port Authority bus station. But my dogs would be on the case long before that.

This is an introduction to X10. I'll talk more about it in future articles, including its problems, post some HOWTOs and discuss some of the more modern home automation alternatives.

The previous article was an introduction to X10 home automation. Now I'll talk about how it works and how to install it.

X10 isn't a product but a communications protocol for sending data over your existing household wiring. As you'll see, that's both really convenient and a bit of a headache at times. X10-compatible devices are marketed by a few companies, including Leviton, Radio Shack and SwitchLinc.

Every X10 device is assigned one of 256 available codes. These codes are broken out into 16 alphabetic house codes (A-P), each of which has 16 numeric unit codes, assigned to it: 1-16. In other words, an X10 address looks like B8 or A15. This lets you build an extensible coding system where the A house codes control your living room devices, the B house codes control your dining room, and so forth.

So I just replace my living room ceiling light switch with an X10 switch, address it as A1 and, presto, I've got an X10 controlled living room ceiling, right?

Basically, yes. But all you've bought yourself is an expensive light switch if you have nothing to control that switch.

Aha, so I'll install another X10 switch in the hallway and address it as A1 and now it will control that first switch, correct?

Not so fast, grasshopper. Here's where we need to discuss the difference between X10 receivers and X10 transmitters. It's the first "gotcha" in X10. Actually, two "gotchas".


An X10 receiver switch functions like a normal light switch but also responds to ON/OFF (and often DIM) codes from an external controller. It doesn't actually generate an X10 code on the household wiring itself. It's best to think of a receiver as a slave.


An X10 transmitter (usually) only transmits X10 codes. Normally, it doesn't actually control a household device like a lighting fixture. It sends a code to an X10 receiver to do that job for it. An X10 transmitter is what you need for your second switch in the above scenario though.


There are X10 transceivers which both transmit X10 and control a household device but let's not muddy the water yet.

The second "gotcha" is more serious.

X10 transmitters and X10 receivers have different wiring requirements.


An X10 receiver can simply replace a standard wall switch. A standard wall switch is wired across the "hot" (black) wire to the lighting fixture, breaking power to the lamp, outlet, whatever.

This kind of switch replacement is well within the skills and available tools of the average person. Just remember to turn off the breaker first!



An X10 transmitter -- and this includes transceivers -- has to be wired like a household outlet, requiring both a "hot" (the black wire) and a "neutral" (the white wire) to work. This isn't how a typical wall switch is wired so installing a transmitter switch will sometimes involve minor household electrical work. Four of the six upgraded wall switches in my house did.

Unless you're competent with household wiring and wall repair, that means an electrician and probably a plasterer/painter. Sometimes you'll get lucky and find that your existing switch box has that white wire in it. Just don't count on it.

If you don't want to hack your existing household electrical, all is not lost. There are other transmitter options, notably tabletop controllers. You just plug these into a wall outlet and you're good to go.

But let's assume that your Uncle Jack is a handy electrician and that he's wired up that transmitter wall switch for you. The receiver switch is set to A1, the transmitter switch is set to A1, Now you've entered the world of X10 home automation.

That X10 transmitter switch could be located anywhere in your house. Let's say you wanted to be able to control the downstairs entry ceiling light from the top of the stairs but your old house didn't come with a three-way switch to do it. X10 to the rescue!

In fact, you could have two, three, four or more such transmitter switches all controlling the same household device without a major household rewiring job. For instance, you could control the outside lights from the kitchen, the patio, the garage and the main entry. X10 doesn't care. It's just four transmitters all addressing the same X10 receiver to control that light.

There's more. Let's say you have your porch light and the driveway spotlight on separate switches, one in the entry way and one in the garage itself. Wouldn't it be nice to have them both controlled from one switch? Easy: install two receiver switches on the same X10 address and use an X10 transmitter switch to control them both.

By now you should have a basic working knowledge of how X10 works. To summarize: a receiver (slave) is an X10 device which controls a light or appliance. A transmitter (master) is an X10 device which remotely controls an X10 receiver (slave). A transmitter tells the slave to turn on, turn off or in some cases to dim/brighten a light (but not a household appliance or fluorescent light, for obvious reasons!)

The X10 world is a lot larger than just wall switches and ceiling lights though and, fortunately, most of them are a lot easier to install than a wall switch. Let's get into some of those devices. I'll be using a lot of links to Smarthome's web site because they're my primary source for X10 equipment. They have a large inventory, are quick with shipping and their prices are competitive. But a Google search will show that there are a lot of retailers in the game.

X10 Starter Packages

Most X10 retailers offer starter packages for new customers. Unless you just want to test the water in the kiddie pool, I'd pass 'em by and go for the mainstream stuff. In particular, I'd avoid the cheap wireless RF X10 gear entirely (except for the high-end Insteon, Bluetooth, Zigby and Z-Wave equipment which we'll get into later). It lacks the range to be useful except in a small apartment.

But if you're not ready to take the X10 plunge yet, the best way to get your feet wet is to purchase a tabletop controller kit which will include a few X10 lamp modules.

I'd make sure that all your devices are also Insteon-compatible. Insteon is the new bridging technology between X10 and the newer near-field wireless home automation technologies which will likely render X10 obsolete within a few years.

This kit will enable a couple of table lamps for X10/Insteon. You can purchase more lamp controllers to expand the system however the controller is a bit limited for a whole-house X10 installation. Eventually you'd want to purchase a few of them to place strategically around the home.

A tabletop controller is just an X10 transmitter, albeit one which often allows you to create macros to control several X10 receivers at once. For instance, you could program a macro called "Evening Lights" which would let you switch all your X10-enabled lights to a preset. You could have another preset for watching TV or for entertaining friends.

Appliance Control

Another popular X10 device is the appliance module. These slaves (receivers) come as either plug-in or wire-in devices. The main difference between it and a lamp module is that it ignores DIM commands (as it should) and has beefier circuitry to handle the higher amperage of appliances like window air conditioners. If you'll be using it on a "noisy" appliance like a television, try to get one with a built-in noise filter. We'll get into the problems caused by powerline noise later. Also, as of the date of this posting, there are no 220-240v Insteon-compatible appliance modules yet.

Utility Modules

Over the many years that X10 has been on the market X10 hobbyists have provided an active skunkworks for lots of novel hardware applications. Insteon hasn't caught up with it all yet but it's moving there. Among the X10-compatible devices available are:

• Motion sensors which generate an X10 signal to trigger X10 slaves, like lights and even audio sources.
• Daylight sensors
• Temperature sensors
• Ground moisture sensors
• Solenoids which control automatic water faucets, window blinds, door openers, etc.
• Home theatre control systems
• Video cameras
• Bridges to security and HVAC systems
• Telephone interfaces

There are even X10 kits available that will let you build your own X10 devices. For instance, there are sensors that will trigger an X10 signal when an LED is illuminated (like a "change filter" warning light on a furnace) and sensors that sense voltage being sent to a non-X10 device, like a sump pump motor or a security alarm.

There are some pretty bizarre X10 applications out there too, like X10.com's Halloween Challenge.

Or check out Bruce Winter's X10 triggers for his own X10 home installation. Bruce is the developer of the open source MisterHouse home automation software which contains some pretty amazing functionality that you wouldn't immediately associate with X10, including text-to-speech and TV program guides. I used to use it here but the dogs would get anxious when they heard my computer say in a british accent, "Hello, it's 6:16pm. The evening lights are on."

As I said earlier, X10 is only limited by your imagination.

So if X10 is the coolest thing since the pop top beercan, why isn't it more popular? If X10 devices have been on retail shelves since 1978, why doesn't your house have them?

For one thing, X10 has always lived in the hobbyist's domain. The devices were first marketed through Radio Shack stores and are pretty much only available through mail order. Even today I talk to professional electricians who've never heard of X10.

Secondly, when a client asks an architect for a home automation system for his new seven-figure McMansion, he's going to get a five-figure home automation system, complete with dedicated control lines, a basement master panel/punchboard and probably lots of disappointment when he needs to replace a proprietary switch twenty years from now.

Third... well... I admit it, X10 can be problematic. If you've cruised those Smarthome pages you might have noticed among all the useful devices a lot of diagostic equipment, repeaters, line bridges, noise filters and so forth. That's because X10, as nice as it is, is dependent on an imperfect vehicle: the "dirty" household electrical backbone with lots of noisy household appliances sharing the road. It's not a matter of if you'll run into problems with your X10 installation but which ones.

You can't cross the river without a bridge

The first problem you'll almost certainly encounter are devices which respond to X10 commands on one circuit but not on another. There can be a few reasons for that but the number one cause is that the X10 transmitter is sitting on one power leg in your breaker box and the X10 receiver is sitting on the other, out of phase with each other. If your household power arrives on two legs, as most do, you'll need to invest in a coupler. This bridges the two legs in your breaker panel so that the X10 signal can pass unmolested. Mount it in an electrical box in or on the breaker panel and install its two wires on breakers on opposite legs. In most localities, it can share two existing 15a breakers.

That's work which really should be done by a licensed electrician. However if you have any 220-240v appliances there's a much easier solution.

Avoid couplers which are also repeaters. My experience has been that repeaters need to be carefully located in your installation (if you need them). They can actually create more problems than they solve but a coupler is almost mandatory.

Say again?

Another problem is long circuit runs or runs which also have noisy appliances like TVs and satellite receivers on them. If you run into problems here, invest in noise filters first. Install these on likely culprits (which are generally cheaply made computers, TVs, battery rechargers and so forth). The rule of thumb is that every house has at least three appliances which generate noise potentially severe enough to affect X10 operation, if only intermittently.

There's not much you can do to make a long circuit run shorter. I have a couple of them in my house. In this case, a repeater may help, but I've still got a transmitter switch that can't talk to a desk lamp eight feet away because there's probably 200 feet of power line between them.

Install a repeater on the same circuit as the deaf device, as close to the breaker panel as you can get. But, beware: repeaters can also repeat noise. A moderate amount of noise in a line, such as from fluorescent lights, can be amplifed in the system and cause other X10 devices to go deaf.

"Hobby quality"

That's how one home automation professional I spoke with described the quality and dependability of X10 products in general. Indeed, I've got some personal experience with that. I had a pull chain entryway light in my old house which used candelabra bulbs. When the cheap, box store-quality bulbs burned out they would occasionally fry my $40 in-ceiling receiver module too, until I got rid of that fixture.

X10 switches are also vulnerable to high humidity. The X10 three-way switch in my garage never works on hot, rainy nights and my basement relay switch sometimes takes three or four hits to work during the warm months. Part of the problem is inherent to X10's open loop protocol where a receiver doesn't acknowledge to the transmitter that it got the command.

Earlier this summer, during a week of incredibly warm and humid NYC weather, I came home to find my outside lights flickering like a haunted house. I thought it was the breaker and changed it. Then I thought it was a bad neutral in the circuit. I checked that. Then I changed the X10 switch. That worked for about two days. Finally I installed a higher-quality Insteon X10 switch and the problem disappeared.

It's a shame that big name companies like Leviton can't do a better job of hardening their X10 products for the real world. The overall quality of X10 devices has improved even in the few short years I've worked with them. Nevertheless, it's pretty annoying when I have to explain to my Polish-speaking house cleaner how she has to hit the basement switch four times in the lower left corner to get it to work on warm days and to only tap the kitchen light switch once or it will go into "dim" mode.

SmartLabs' Insteon devices seem to be more durable and better designed overall so that's what I'm upgrading the house to now.

The X10 Delay

This probably bothers most people initially. Because of the nature of the X10 protocol there's a short delay between the time you hit a transmitter switch and the receiver responds to it -- generally about one second. Unless you've programmed a macro on a third X10 device, in which case it's more like two seconds.

All I can say is that you get used to it. However, Insteon devices fix a lot of these problems. And that's where we'll go next.

There have been times when I've been so fed up with an annoying X10 glitch that I've wanted to chuck it all and move back to the toggle switch world. But I'm so used to the convenience of X10 that this Luddite rebelliousness lasts about three seconds.

In the past few years new technologies challenging X10's low cost and DIY-ability have become available. With the exception of dark horses like UPB, HomePlug, CeBus and a couple of others, and of course the hyper-expensive dedicated control line stuff, most newer home automation devices have abandoned problematic powerline protocols and adopted short-range wireless. The latter group includes Insteon, ZigBee, Z-Wave and Bluetooth. Wireless has become so reliable, pervasive and the hardware has gotten small enough that wireless is a natural for home automation.

However, most of the above are pretty slim in terms product lines and only one manufacturer offers an upgrade path for existing X10 owners: Insteon.

Insteon supports dual-mode protocol. It communicates in wireless mode at 131.65 KHz with other Insteon devices but can also be configured to generate X10 commands over the powerline. This was a brilliant marketing idea because it means that millions of X10 users can upgrade to the superior communications protocol of wireless while still maintaining backwards compatibility with their existing X10 infratructure. As your existing X10 devices flake out, and they eventually will, they can be replaced with Insteon.

Why is Insteon superior to X10?

• Insteon is dual mode. It sends signals both through the air (RF) and over the home's electrical wires via X10 protocol.
• Like an Ethernet card's MAC address, every Insteon device has its own unique ID. Device conflicts are virtually impossible.
• Every Insteon device is a repeater. While it's highly recommended to use an Insteon repeater/bridge in your installation, this is mainly to synchronize your existing X10 devices.
• Every Insteon message is confirmed. The transmitter automatically retries a command until the receiver confirms that it got the message. Conversely, X10 is an open loop -- the transmitter doesn't know if the receiver got the message, which sometimes leads to multiple button presses.
• Insteon messages take less than 5 / 100ths of a second to get through so things turn "on" instantly (Insteon = instant-on).
• No central controller or networking setup is required - a simple plug-n-tap™ is all that is required to link one Insteon product to another.
• Unlike X10, all Insteon devices can be remotely programmed from a PC -- no removing switch plates to manually change addresses.

For a detailed description of what Insteon is and how it works technically, see http://www.insteon.net/pdf/insteonthedetails.pdf.

What bears special attention is "Every Insteon is a repeater". Insteon is peer-to-peer. That's important because the more Insteon devices you add to your network, the more reliable communications becomes. Unfortunately it doesn't do a thing for your X10-only devices. They will still be stuck listening to the powerline. This is why I said earlier that you should try to buy Insteon-compatible X10 devices.

Within the next few years, X10 will probably be deprecated and replaced by a new mainstream household automation protocol. From my inexpert perspective, Insteon is the top contender, if only because it's the only bridging technology for millions of existing X10 users. Wi-fi has a shot but, so far, no manufacturer has gotten behind it.

X10 transmitters and tabletop controllers are nice but to really explore the potential of X10 you need a central controller. If you've scanned the X10 ecommerce sites you've probably seen a few, along with their frightening price tags. Most of them are basically just PCs running a closed-source application. You've already got a PC so why invest in another one?

There are lots of commercial and open source packages that will let you control your X10 devices from your own PC. These packages range from professional turnkey systems like ActiveHome and Smarthome Essential to open-source, soup-to-nuts hobbyist packages like MisterHouse to Unix command line programs like Heyu and Xtend. The first two packages come with the hardware interface you'll need to link your computer to your X10 network. The rest require you to purchase an inexpensive serial port interface like the CM11A controller.

Commercial packages are really hard to resist, especially for the convenience and their modest cost (under $100). Conversely, open source/free packages can be a real bear to set up, especially for non-techies, and they require your computer to be left on 24/7. The only justification for using something like MisterHouse is if you want the ultimate in home automation and an extendable platform for adding functionality not supported by commercial software. You'll also have to be pretty competent hacker and like spending hours downloading, installing and debugging third-party packages.

I'm one of them, nevertheless MisterHouse was much more program than I needed so I wrote my own X10 daemon based on the Heyu CLI software.

First, install a CM11A controller on a free serial port on your Linux/FreeBSD/*ix box. Note: right there is a good reason to consider one of the above commercial programs because they use the USB port. A lot of modern computers, especially laptops, don't have serial ports.

Next, download, compile and set up Heyu. Your home's X10 configuration is set up in /etc/heyu/x10.conf:

#
# this file should contain x10 appliance aliases, one per line, as:
#   appliance-name  housecode  modulenumber
# for example:
#  mydesklamp   A       4
#  atticfan     B       3

bedroom_nightstand              A       1
bedroom_ceiling1                A       2
bedroom_ceiling2                A       3
computer_room_cabs              A       5
computer_room_desk              A       6
back_bedroom_sconce             A       8
livingroom_ceiling              A       9
cabinets                        A       10
entryway_ceiling                A       13
upstairs_sconce                 A       14
outside_front                   A       15
diningroom_ceiling              A       16
kitchen_ceiling                 B       1
kitchen_sconces                 B       2
backyard_floods                 B       5
kitchen_ext_spots               B       6
kitchen_ext_sconces             B       7
garage_ceiling                  B       9
basement_ceiling                C       1
dsl_modem                       G       1
wireless_router                 G       2

# set default housecode -- the one the switches will use
HOUSECODE       A
#
# Set the serial port the program will use.
TTY     /dev/cuad0
# The NEWFORMAT directive allows version 1.28 and higher to display more
# informative messages.
NEWFORMAT
#
# The file listed with MACROXREF is where HEYU will store the addresses
# where macros are loaded in the CM11A.  If you don't use this directive,
# The macros addresses will not be cross-referenced.
MACROXREF       .x10macroxref

Then test the heyu CLI command to see if it's working with something like:

% heyu turn computer_room_desk on

Then, install the perl module Astro::Sunrise and copy this software to x10_scheduler.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Astro::Sunrise;
use Time::Local;
use Sys::Syslog;

# Config for your house
use constant LATITUDE       => 40.641;
use constant LONGITUDE      => -74.016;
use constant TZ             => -5;
use constant DST            => 1;


# X10 device setup
# Device aliases are set up in /etc/heyu/x10.conf.
# These are the devices we're interested in and how we want
# them controlled.
my @DEVICES = (
    [ 'bedroom_nightstand', 'sunset-45', 'on' ],
    [ 'upstairs_sconce', 'sunset-45', 'on' ],
    [ 'entryway_ceiling', 'sunset-45', 'on' ],
    [ 'outside_front', 'sunset-30', 'on' ],
    [ 'cabinets', 'sunset-45', 'on' ],

    [ 'garage_ceiling', '23:01', 'off' ],

    [ 'upstairs_sconce', '00:01', 'dim+12' ],
    [ 'entryway_ceiling', '00:01', 'dim+15' ],
    [ 'outside_front', '00:01', 'off' ],
    [ 'cabinets', '23:01', 'off' ],
    [ 'basement_ceiling', '00:01', 'off' ],

    [ 'upstairs_sconce', '01:00', 'off' ],
    [ 'entryway_ceiling', '01:00', 'off' ],
    [ 'basement_ceiling', '01:00', 'off' ],
    [ 'computer_room_cabs', '01:00', 'off' ],
    [ 'bedroom_nightstand', '01:00', 'off' ],
);

$HEYU_CMD   = '/usr/local/bin/heyu turn %s %s';

use constant    SYSLOG_INFO     => 0;
use constant    SYSLOG_WARNING  => 1;
use constant    SYSLOG_FATAL    => 2;

#####################
### Program begins ##
#####################

openlog "x10_scheduler", "cons,pid", "local1";
syslogger(SYSLOG_INFO, "started");

# Prime today's date
my @last_run_time = localtime;
&process_devices_daily;

# Runs until killed with SIGHUP

while (1) {

    @this_run_time = localtime;

    # If the day has changed, reprocess the devices array
    if ($last_run_time[3] != $this_run_time[3]) {
        &process_devices_daily;
    }

    $time_now = time;

    for (my $i=0; $i < scalar(@DEVICES); $i++) {

        if ($DEVICES[$i][4] eq 'do it' && $DEVICES[$i][3] < $time_now) {

            my $cmd;

            # Is it an on/off type device?
            if ($DEVICES[$i][2] eq 'on' || $DEVICES[$i][2] eq 'off') {
                $cmd = sprintf($HEYU_CMD, $DEVICES[$i][0], $DEVICES[$i][2]);
                $DEVICES[$i][4] = 'done';
            }

            #  It must be a dim/bright device
            else {
                my ($dim, $offset) = split(/\+/, $DEVICES[$i][2]);
                $offset = '' unless defined $offset;

                $cmd = sprintf($HEYU_CMD, $DEVICES[$i][0], "$dim $offset");
                $DEVICES[$i][4] = 'done';
            }

            # Run the command
            syslogger(SYSLOG_INFO, "Running $cmd");
            system($cmd);
        }
    }

    # Log our last run time and take a nap for a minute
    @last_run_time = localtime;
    sleep 60;
}

# Process/reprocess the daily X10 events list.
# In daemon operation, this list will reload automatically at midnight.
sub process_devices_daily
{
    my $trigger_time;
    my @today = localtime;
    my $syslog_sunset = 0;

    for (my $i=0; $i < scalar(@DEVICES); $i++) {

        if ($DEVICES[$i][1] =~ /^sun/) {
            my ($sun, $op, $offset) = $DEVICES[$i][1] =~ /^(\w+)([\-\+])(.*)$/;
            $op = '' unless defined $op;
            $offset = '' unless defined $offset;

            my ($sunrise, $sunset) = sunrise($today[5]+1900, $today[4]+1,
               $today[3], LONGITUDE, LATITUDE, TZ, DST);
            my $trigger_str = ($sun eq 'sunset') ? $sunset : $sunrise;

            if ($syslog_sunset++ == 0) {
                syslogger(SYSLOG_INFO, sprintf("Sunrise: $sunrise Sunset: $sunset"));
            }

            my ($hour, $minute) = split(/:/, $trigger_str);

            my @temp = localtime;
            $temp[2] = $hour;
            $temp[1] = $minute;
            $temp[0] = 0;

            $trigger_time = timelocal(@temp);
            $offset *= 60;

            $trigger_time = ($op eq '-') ?  $trigger_time - $offset : $trigger_time + $offset;
        }
        else {
            my ($hour, $minute) = split(/:/, $DEVICES[$i][1]);

            my @temp = localtime;
            $temp[2] = $hour;
            $temp[1] = $minute;
            $temp[0] = 0;

            $trigger_time = timelocal(@temp);
        }

        $DEVICES[$i][3] = $trigger_time;

        if ($trigger_time < time) {
            $DEVICES[$i][4] = 'done';
        }
        else {
            $DEVICES[$i][4] = 'do it';
            syslogger(SYSLOG_INFO,
                sprintf("X10 event today: $DEVICES[$i][0] ACTION=$DEVICES[$i][2] TIME= %02d:%02d",
                 (localtime($trigger_time))[2], (localtime($trigger_time))[1]));
        }
    }
}

sub syslogger
{
    if ($_[0] == SYSLOG_FATAL) {
        syslog('warning', "FATAL: $_[1]");
        exit 0;
    }
    if ($_[0] == SYSLOG_WARNING) {
        syslog('warning', "WARNING: $_[1]");
    }
    else {
        syslog('notice', "$_[1]");
    }
}

After you've set up your configuration and X10 events in the program just launch it in the background:

% perl x10_scheduler.pl&

If you don't know your latitude/longitude you can get it here.

By the way, if you have a real sharp eye you probably noticed the "dsl_modem" and "wireless_router" device aliases in my /etc/heyu/x10.conf file. Both of these are on X10 appliance modules. One of the FreeBSD boxes runs a shell script out of cron which periodically pings a set of IP addresses outside my network. If they all fail, it runs a heyu task which turns them off for 15 seconds and turns them back on again, effectively rebooting them.

The popularity of home improvement shows demonstrates that people are fascinated by the idea of taking something old and beat up and making it new again. But as anyone who has undertaken a large scale home renovation knows, the reality of doing it yourself lives on another planet from the romantic, everything-works-the-first-time impression that these shows portray.

For one, you won't have a professional contractor standing out of the shot, ready to yell "Stop! Stop!!" before you slice through a BX cable with your demolition saw. Nor will you have a bunch of off-camera laborers to unload the truck, clean up the mess, lift bags of cement, dig holes, chop up concrete, strip plaster, haul debris and all of those other tasks that seem to take care of themselves on TV. These shows do a great job of introducing viewers to the details of home renovation. But never forget that Bob Vila goes back to the Ramada Inn for a nice dinner and a hot shower at the end of the day. You might not have a functioning kitchen, or even water.

Despite the best of intentions, the FHA says that most owner renovations fail. Besides requiring a lot of energy and knowledge of the skills and materials needed to see a house renovation project through to the end, let alone to do them right, it takes more patience and attention to detail than most people can spare. In other words, it requires pretty much the same qualities that you would look for in a general contractor. And it explains why we have building codes.

This is a shot of my dining room. For two years. If that doesn't bother you, read on, brother.

People who undertake a home renovation are a different breed from those who purchase move-in condition homes. They want a house they can feel a part of, not just a shell for their furniture. The breed breaks down further to those who call a general contractor and those willing to walk the fire. For those of you in the former group, read no further. Contact an architect, find a reliable general contractor and continue paying rent until it's finished. You're probably smarter than the other group, but remember to bring money and lots of it. The average contractor gut rehab on my block runs in excess of a quarter-million bucks, which is more than than I paid for my house! That's just basic rehab, no fancy hardwood, Viking stoves, wine cellars or even landscaping. "Golden Nail" renos can be double that, or more.

If you have the money to hire a general contractor, do it. In the long run, you'll get most of the same satisfaction and, providing you use a reputable, experienced GC, you'll also know that the job was done right. You just won't have the same bragging rights as those who did it themselves. On the other hand, you also won't know where all the mistakes you made are either.

The downside? Expect to pay as much as 5 times what it would cost to do the job yourself. Hey, do the math! A skilled tradesman earns anywhere from $150 to $400 per day and you'll need several trades along with their helpers. Add to that the general contractor's fee, which can be up to 25%. Depending on house prices in your neighborhood and where the housing market is when you sell, the bill may push your investment far above recoup at sale time.

By the way, don't even attempt to play real estate speculator with renovation projects unless you really know what you're doing. Most home improvements won't add that much value to your home. Even experienced GCs get burned doing that. Some improvements may even cost you at sale time, especially if you failed to get the necessary permits (and the seller's attorney finds out).

Still want to do it yourself? Here's some stuff to ask yourself first, and be honest.

• Is your spouse as nuts are you are?
• Are your kids old enough to swing a hammer or just old enough to turn on the table saw when you're not looking?
• Can you invest several hours a day in your project, as well as all your weekends and holidays for three or four or more years?
• Are you bothered by nuisances like a bed full of plaster dust, slaloming around ladders to get to your morning coffee, tripping over extension cords in the dark, eating take-out for months and occasionally bathing in the sink?
• Are you ready to give up all your precious, time-consuming hobbies?
• Have you ever done construction before and do you like reading how-to books, especially stuff as dry as building codes?

If not, do yourself a favor... don't do it. I don't have kids but just the addition of two large, energetic puppies to the household was enough to grind my own renovation efforts to a halt.

Keep this in mind too. Do-it-yourself home renovations are long-running ordeals and you probably have a job and at least some indisposable social life to attend to. A project that might take a contractor with an experienced crew two weeks to complete might take you six months of weekends and evenings, no matter how good you are. For example, look at my living and dining room pages. The woodworking there alone took me 16 months!

Even if you decide to do the work, pick your battles. Norm Abrams, the demigod of home improvement, wrote that he spent years getting through all the finish work on his own house. Even he knew when to call for outside help.

Remember that building codes only specify minimum standards. If local codes dictate that licensed contractors do certain work like electrical or plumbing, obey! To do otherwise could liable you for fines, difficulty in selling your home, and possibly even denial of insurance coverage should things go terribly wrong. In these boom building times, you can always find licensed independents willing to work with you as an advisor while you do most of the actual work. Beware, however. They can be harder taskmasters than municipal building inspectors because their reputations are on the line.

Finally, for those who decide to call the general contractor, you're still not out of the woods yet. Always... always... check a GC's references, papers and insurance. Never... ever... hire an unlicensed GC. To emphasize that point, here's a sad story which happened on my own block:

A 70 year-old woman asked her daughter to move in to care for her. She decided to provide her with a basement apartment and a convenient street level private entrance. She called a contractor who had stuck a card in her mailbox. The contractor, who was unlicensed and incompetent, told her that she didn't need a building permit for the job. Being unlicensed, he couldn't have gotten her one anyway, which of course is why he told her that. A couple of weeks after the work started, with her front yard completely gutted and old gas and electrical pipes exposed, a Buildings Dept inspector shut her down with a heavy fine and a stop-work order. The contractor skipped with her five-figure deposit. Her neighbor sued her for $12,000 in damage to his front stoop, which began collapsing because of the careless excavation. She had to hire a lawyer. Then she had to start over with an architect and another GC (licensed). In the end, she spent over twice what she would have had she just checked her first first GC's paperwork and references.

One question I used to get asked on the old blog was, "where did you buy your window and door casings?" As any old houseophile knows, in the olden days trimwork wasn't something you picked up at The Borg. Even in modest turn-of-the-century homes those mouldings were often designed by the home's architect. Constructing them was the job of a master carpenter. Elaborate trimwork is one of the major details of an old home as well as one of its greatest attractions today. People with old homes go to great lengths to carefully strip and rehabilitate old baseboards and casings. I can't stand stripping so I prefer to just remake them.

Compound casings are one of my favorite things to build -- not because they're a woodworking challenge but because they're a lot easier to construct than they look. They're also a great way to disguise an uneven plaster wall.

The trick is to create setbacks and shadow lines. Below is a relatively simple example, which I annotated to show the various components. This is the entrance to my living room.



1 - I started off by building the base surround. This was leftover red oak plywood from a cabinet project. I shimmed it straight and plumb and fastened it with 10d finishing nails to the jack studs and header. I like using plywood for this anyway because the color is usually more uniform than plank lumber.

2 - next, I glued on some red oak lathing. This was cut on my table saw in 3/8" strips from a scrap of 6/4 lumber I salvaged from the demolition.

The wide horizontal piece was a leftover riser scrap from when I built the basement stairs (shown more clearly here). I ran it through the planer to get it down to 3/8".

3 - next was 3/4" quarter round that I made on my router table from a long scrap of red oak. Actually, I installed 4 first, then filled the gap with this. It served two purpose. It gave a nice turn to the wall casing but, more importantly, it hid the plywood edge on the surround.

4 - next was some store-bought casing, Dyke's #605 to be exact. Except for the crown moulding over the doorway it was the only lumber I bought for this job. I've got the router bits to cut my own now.

5 - this is a 1/2 x 1-1/2 return to the wall built from (you guessed it) a scrap that I ran through the planer to take down some of its visual weight. Then I used a 1/4" roundover bit to ease the sharp edges. It serves another purpose too: to give a flat abutment for the base moulding.

---

Building compound details is really just about using your imagination, or in my case fusing my sense of cheapness to art. I basically build around whatever lumber scraps I'm tripping over in my shop at the moment. Fact is, all of my doorways are a little different; built from whatever I had on hand in the scrap pile. Plan your nailing points to disguise the nail heads as much as possible and provide a solid nailing surface for the casing. I use a lot of carpenter's glue on these things and rely on squeeze clamps and brad nails to tack it together till the glue dries.

You can also use compound mouldings and casings in your pediments and baseboards. Here's an example of both: the living room windows and door to the front deck:



And the finished effect:

Just when I think I've got this electrical stuff all figured out, something tosses me in the weeds. This morning I noticed that the clock on my four-year old Frigidaire stove wasn't working. Neither were the buttons. Great, the computer's shot. Of course, it's got an electronic starter that depends on the computer so the oven's not working either.

Well, I guess it's about time. The Frigidaire microwave I bought at the same time had to be replaced last fall. Nice quality control, guys. I remember when companies like Frigidaire and Maytag had good reputations for durability.

But that wasn't the end of it.

Those of you who have followed my X10 home automation articles know that I have a love/hate thing going for these devices. Or rather, like Frigidaire, I'm annoyed by the sub-standard quality of X10 hardware in general.

At 20 minutes before sundown, my FreeBSD server automatically sets the evening lights. Included in that parcel of X10 commands are the low-voltage cabinet lights in the living and dining rooms and what Karen calls my "whorehouse lights" -- some admittedly gaudy Victorian lamps with low-wattage bulbs that I use for accent lighting.

Well, those were out too. But not all of them; just the lamps that were listening on the X10 code, A11. The others were fine. Due to the open loop protocol of X10 this can happen occasionally if something in the house generates electrical noise on the powerline at the same time the X10 command is sent. Hopefully, that's all it was because these X10 devices ain't cheap.

I tried to turn them on from the wall transmitter switch in the living room. Nada. I took out my portable X10 controller and plugged it into the same outlet as one of the dead X10 lamps. Still nada. I moved the X10 receivers to other outlets and changed their house codes. Still nothing.

For some inconceivable reason, every X10 receiver that was set to listen on the A11 code was fried -- a total of four devices: three lamp modules and one inline X10 relay switch. None of the two dozen or so other X10 devices were affected.

What the heck is going on?? What would cause four X10 controllers to grenade just because they were listening to the same code? I mean, ALL the X10 controllers are listening to the same powerline signal. All of the affected receivers were sitting on different breakers. The only commonality is that these receivers were set to fire on A11. And they ALL blew out.

Then I remembered the stove. What could cause the electronics in these devices to wad up but not affect anything else, like my computers, router, TVs, DSL modem, or even the other X10 devices? Although we had a lot of wind and rain from Ernesto today we didn't have any lightning. And, besides, our powerlines are underground here.

Anyone got an idea? I'm completely stumped.

This was the first Labor Day weekend since I got this place that I wasn't knee deep in some h/i project. Last year I was in the middle of the guest room renovation. Now, I'm waiting for lumber estimates so I can start on the master bedroom rehab. I took the opportunity to hack on my Drupal software here and to play with the Categories and Views modules on a private Drupal instance. Nice software but, man, does it need a coherent manual.

We got some of Ernesto on Friday/Saturday. The wind down here on NY Harbor was pretty fierce so there was clean up to do, which is about as clumsy a segue as I can make to my house topic o' the day: compressors.

I've got a 20-gallon compressor. It's one of my favorite tools in the shop -- not just for what it typically does but for some of the oddball uses you can put it to, like drying off a washed car and blowing out the shop after a sanding marathon. It can even take out a mosquito at six feet. Today it was my broom.

I bought a cheap pressure gun wand from Harbor Freight a few years ago and use that to sweep off my stoop and sidewalk. Unlike a broom, it reaches into corners and under parked cars. It's also excellent for blowing dead leaves out of a flower bed.

While I was waiting, and waiting, to close on this house I had some pretty whacky things I wanted to build into the place. One was a permanent compressor port on each floor. The other was a whole house beer tap. Suffice to say, I didn't do either one but I really regret not running the copper for that compressor when I had the walls open. It would have saved me several trips over the hundred-foot compressor hose snaking its way two stories up from the basement.

The most bizarre compressor application I've heard of has to be an urban legend. On the other hand, when I read that 40% of Americans reject the scientific basis of human evolution I've gotta think there's someone out there dumb enough to try it.

A guy needed a braising torch to work on his car. He couldn't afford one so he had a brilliant idea. He hauled his compressor into the kitchen and jury-rigged a fitting from the compressor's air inlet to the natural gas outlet. Then he filled the 20-gallon tank with gas, readied his homemade torch, flipped the switch and... you can figure out how this story ended.

On that note, the This Old House web site has a cool pictorial series called Home Inspection Nightmares. Check it out. A light switch in the shower??

Several years ago, a home inspector on the Harley Davidson Usenet newsgroup, rec.motorcycles.harley, sent me a photo of something he said he had encountered. A home owner wanted to be able to listen to music while laying on a raft in his swimming pool. To power his ghetto blaster, he made a floating electrical outlet from an old dishwashing detergent bottle, a duplex outlet and lots of masking tape. In his defense, he used a GFCI outlet. I've gotta find where I archived that picture.

I go up to Nantucket four or five times a year to work on a friend's house and scarf cohog chowda' till I leave a butter slick. At the local Buildings Dept they have a Wall of Shame containing pictures of violations that the inspectors have encountered. Some of them are priceless. Why someone whose house is sitting on raw land worth seven figures would want to cut corners like these, I can't fathom. Like the guy who used a vaccuum cleaner hose to tie his washing machine's drain to the main stack.

Then there's the current winner of the annual Darwin Awards:

(2006, Adelaide, Australia)
In the suburbs of Adelaide, "the undisputed cannabis capital of Australia", sleeping
residents were awakened by a resounding explosion. A smoking hole was found in a
neighbor's backyard, still reeking of the pungent odor of marijuana.
Police found the remains of a man at the bottom of the hole.

They learned that the deceased had setup a hidden hydroponic system in a large
water tank buried in his backyard. He used a CO2 generator -- a small flame
from a butane gas bottle -- to improve plant growth. On this particular evening,
the man had climbed down into his garden paradise, only to find that the flame
had gone out. Without knowing how many days the gas had been leaking into his,
er, bomb, he re-lit the flame. 

And... done.

Shortly after I moved to Brooklyn, one of the largest local independent home improvement centers closed, Mars Lumber. It's now an Outback Steak House. The attitude at Mars was gruff and impatient but there were always professional trades people hanging around to give good advice. Mars fell victim to NYC's first Home Depot store on Hamilton Avenue. Home Depot was bright, clean, well stocked and the people were friendly. Good riddance to Mars.

But then a funny thing happened. The Hamilton Avenue Home Depot took an abrupt nose dive. The quality of the help was the first casualty. The bright, smiling Home Depot associates suddenly disappeared and were replaced by surly illiterates who looked and behaved more like they were doing community service. The aisles and the parking lot were filthy. The shelves looked like a pre-glastnost Soviet supermarket. The lines at the registers were typically fifteen minutes long.

One Friday night, a friend and I went to Hamilton Ave to pick up some copper pipe when a pair of skanky women slithered up and asked, "Want a date?"

Hookers?! In Home Depot? Well, at least they were working the plumbing department. We left, vowing never to return to this Home Depot again. We started using the New Jersey HDs instead.

Then Home Depot opened another, larger store in Coney Island. While it hasn't sunk to the depths of the Hamilton Ave store, it too went through its honeymoon period of wonderfulness before settling into mediocrity.

My real world job at the time was managing developer for a diversity internet jobs site and Home Depot was interested in using us to put their hiring process online. Our general manager dispatched me to audit Home Depot's screening process at the Coney Island store.

I spent the morning watching applicants answer questions at a kiosk terminal and interviewing store employees who were convinced that I was a mole dispatched from Atlanta headquarters. Afterwards, I purchased a few items for myself. Talk about service! The store's assistant manager personally escorted me through the aisles, unbelieving of my disclaimer that I wasn't an HR suit from corporate.

I didn't really learn anything about HD's employment processes that I didn't already suspect. The kiosk screening process was a joke. I watched a Russian guy who didn't speak English sit there with his American wife reading the screens to him and even answering the questions for him. Nobody monitored them. They weren't allowed to because it could potentially be discriminatory.

I did learn something from one of the associates that gave perspective to an observation I'd made based on the Hamilton Ave and Coney Island stores. When Home Depot opens a new store it packs the staff with ringers: star performers from other stores. After a couple of months, they move on to another store opening after they've trained the permanent crew (like that Russian guy). It's a valid corporate training process but it also leads to false expectations from customers expecting to get the same quality advice they got the last trip.

I snooped on a few customer interactions too. My favorite was the associate in the electrical department who told a customer that he could install any size breaker in his panel. The numbers only meant that 30 was for a stove and 15 was too small to run a window air conditioner... deceptively dangerous advice.

Anyway, Lowes finally opened a store here and while it also slacked off after the grand opening it's still several notches above the local Home Depots. So that's where I go.

But my first stop is always the local independents like Kamco, Dykes, Rosenzwieg, AJ Meyer and Bruno, where I get that dismissive Mars attitude but I also know that I'm speaking with someone who knows what he's talking about.

I've only got ho-hum jobs on my plate this weekend: insulation, plaster fixes, running BX... nothing worth blogging about. But I was thinking forward to what I'm going to need to finish off this bedroom renovation (in about three months).

Since the renovation involved merging two bedrooms, I now have two entrances into it. The problem is that the doorway I want to get rid of gives the upstairs hallway much of its summer light and is also needed for cross ventilation. After mulling it over, I decided to replace it with a knee wall topped by a pair of stained glass windows.

Four years ago, when I was deep into my living room reno, I had to replace a pair of cheapo french doors to the deck over the garage. I built the red oak doors in my shop and started pricing store-bought stained glass panels. Of course, nothing came in the sizes I needed and to commission those four panels was going to cost me well over a thousand bucks. So I sez to myself (I sez), "how hard can it be?" Stained glass fabrication looked like simple woodworking joinery to me.

I spoke to my neighbor, Betsy, who had once taken a stained glass class, and she lent me all her tools, including a glass grinder. But I was clueless how to get started. Betsy said she wanted to take a refresher class because she wanted to make cabinet door inserts for her own kitchen reno. So did Karen. So we all signed up for a beginner's class at Albert Stained Glass in Park Slope. In fact, we were the class.

After learning the basic techniques, both copper foil and lead cane joinery, it turned out to be almost as simple as I'd assumed it would be. Then again, I wasn't building church windows.

The layout. The design incorporates elements in the existing living room transom and entryway sidelight windows. My table saw extension is the layout table.		Laying out stained glass is a bit like building a jig saw puzzle. Tight fits are important because stained glass is basically just a broken window repaired with lead cane. Gaps between cane joints or cane and glass will be weak points later.
Two down, two to go. The panels are puttied and polished and have to lay flat for three days to cure. So do I occasionally.		The stained glass panels are installed in the living room french doors. Unfortunately, the ornate wrought iron doors behind it kind of obliterate the glass with the low winter sunlight beating on them.

The total cost of materials to make these four panels, including the cost of the class and my own set of stained glass tools, was under $500. Even better, I was able to leverage that investment to make two pairs of doors for a couple of cabinets I built for my dining room renovation. If I recall, the total cost for the glass and the lead cane for this was under $100, or about the same material cost as four sheets of plain, boring glass. I think this looks better.

I've got four stained glass projects to do: the media cabinet in the living room, the skylight over the stairs. the bathroom skylight and these bedroom windows. But I also want to build a couple of weatherproof stained glass light boxes for the back yard, with low voltage lights inside. I think that would look pretty cool, especially in the winter.

Anyway, stained glass fabrication is something that almost anyone can learn to do pretty well. And there are tons of books with tasty stained glass patterns available so it's almost like paint-by-the-numbers. Just take a class to learn the basics and let your imagination loose on your home.

Being the gadget freak I am, I'm of course a big fan of home automation. 90% of my house is under X10 control and the command of a FreeBSD server running some perl scripts I hacked together. I've already written some articles about X10 and my trials and tribs with it so I won't repeat them here.

I love having my house turn its own lights on/off. I like setting up whole-house lighting schemes, available at the touch of a button. But truthfully, X10 is a lot like owning a 1970s-vintage Triumph motorcycle. You run it for a while, then you spend a whole lot of time fixing it. X10 devices will work fine for years only to suddenly stop responding to commands. After hours of sleuthing you find that it's because the battery charger for your new camera is generating a noise storm on your household wiring.

As a product, X10 is almost as old as that Triumph. Like the Triumph, X10 was also invented in the UK, as was the notorious Lucas Electric Ltd, which was a large part of Meriden Triumph's downfall. If you're not a Brit motorhead and have never heard of Lucas, it's probably best summed up by a Lucas teeshirt I've got. On one side is the slogan: "A gentleman doesn't motor about after dark!" On the other is a Triumph headlight switch with the markings: Off, Flicker, Dim.
Anyway, that's why I was excited by a new home automation protocol that hit the market last year: Insteon. The best part is that it's cross-compatible with X10. However Insteon's core protocol is 900 MHz wireless. Besides meaning no more problems with noisy household electrical devices causing my lights to freak out I can upgrade my existing X10 network gradually. Also, each Insteon device comes with its own globally-unique address, much like the MAC address in an Ethernet card. Programming Insteon hardware is just a matter of putting two or more devices into "link mode" and they magically find each other.

During a particularly hot and humid week here in Brooklyn this summer, I arrived home one night to find my outside lights flickering like a haunted house and my neighbors debating whether or not they should call the fire department. The culprit was yet another flakey X10 switch. I replaced it with a spare and that one lasted two days.

Fed up, I ordered an Insteon relay switch from Smarthome. It was noticeably better constructed. And it did the trick. After giving it a couple of months' testing, I decided to replace all my X10 gear with Insteon. Two weeks ago I placed a large order with Smarthome. Last night, I converted the two master bedroom overhead lights and wall switch from X10 to Insteon wireless. The wall switch looks really cool too! Blue backlit buttons. Nice, firm action.

Problem solved? Sorta. One of the issues here is that almost all the ceiling lights in this house were originally pullchain fixtures. That's usually not a problem with home automation hardware like this. You just bury an X10/Insteon receiver in the ceiling electrical box with the light, wire the lighting fixture to it and add a transmitter switch to the wall. Then you link them together.

The installation went smoothly, although it meant having to remove and reinstall a heavy ceiling fan/light. What didn't go so well was turning off those lights for the night. I hit the two buttons together and the switch locked up like a Windows 95 machine. The only way to unlock the switch was to literally reboot it, or what Insteon calls "activating the air gap". You pull out a tiny little switch for 10 seconds and push it back in. That didn't fix it either, leastwise not for a few minutes. Then it just started working again. Bizarre. I was very concerned that I'd have to take down the ceiling lights again to relink those receivers to the wall switch.

Fortunately, Smarthome makes some software which lets you do this linking via a home computer over the USB bus to an Insteon wall controller. I've ordered that. I know I'm gonna need it, probably sooner than later. Sigh.

One of the other problems is that the scheduling software that comes with the wall controller, or rather what you download from Smarthome's site later, can only be programmed by... you guessed it... activating the link mode on the device. Which means getting back into the ceiling. Crap!! However, after some hacking I found that the scheduling software uses XML to store its device configuration. That means I can (probably) program those devices manually in a text editor. We'll see.

(Two hours later: yup. Copying the Timer Software's XML <DEVICE>..</DEVICE> block, replacing the ADDRESS and incrementing the Device ID appears to work. At last, some good news.)

I'm back from Nantucket, back home in Brooklyn to resume the sawdust saga of the never-ending bedroom reno.

Every year, Karen and I make the trek to Nantucket for the annual Christmas Stroll. And I do mean trek. Door to door, with the five hour drive from Brooklyn to Hyannis at 85KNS (Karen Nominal Speed), the 45 minute wait for the ferry and the 2:15 hour sea voyage, you can almost fly to Moscow as quickly.

And lemme tell you, traveling in a minivan with six dogs -- from a 12 year-old French bulldog up to an 18 month-old Newfoundland -- is no Sunday drive. Fortunately, the weather was mild enough that I could crack a window. Otherwise, the toxic SBDs emitting from Karen's English bulldog would have etched the glass.



Nantucket is an island 30 miles south of Hyannis, MA. It's aggressively clinged to its ambience as a historic fishing village. But it's a bit like Manhattan's Soho, which desperately tries to maintain an idealistic, Disneyfied vision of an artistic community even though almost no practicing artists actually live there anymore. Same deal here. Very few fishermen can afford to live on Nantucket either. While I doubt that olden-days Nantucket looked anywhere near as manicured as it does today, or that any bosun's mate ever paid $11.75 for a hamburger at The Brotherhood, it's nevertheless a very pretty place.



Karen bought a nice house on Nantucket back in the early 90s when island real estate prices were depressed. The mortgage is low enough that her May-October rental pretty much pays for the place. On the other hand, it means that we can only get to Nantucket off-season, usually when the ice is blowing like shrapnel at 40 knots and 80% of the stores and restaurants are closed. Christmas Stroll is Nantucket's last outdoor party before the town's population drops from its summer peak of 70,000 and its 6,000 fulltime islanders hunker down for a nor'easter winter.



The town really tarts itself up for Christmas Stroll but the decorations are traditional, tasteful and original. Nobody actually said you could get arrested for planting a blow-up snowman on your front lawn but they were conspicuously absent.

Here's Karen leaving one of her favorite stores in town. The wreath decorating the storefront is made with real fruit, as my apple-loving newfie discovered before I did.



Most of the island's architecture is grey cedar shake with simple, classic trim. There's not a heckuva lot to it but there's a quiet elegance about the uniformity which makes you focus on the design and shape of the houses rather than the tinsel and glitter.

Except for a tiny Radio Shack tucked into the basement of a wood frame building outside town, there are no chain stores on Nantucket. Even Nantucket's commercial districts look like residential neighborhoods. With its signage laws, it's sometimes tough to tell what a store is selling without walking inside. Or even if it's a store.



This is a commercial electrical supply warehouse.



While most of the island is grey shingle, the town of Nantucket offers some spectacular old federals, vics and painted ladies.




But the best part of the island is the quahog chowder. I pretty much live on it when I'm there, then spend the next two months waiting for my heart attack.

If you're into sky watching, you won't find a darker place than Nantucket at midnight. There's virtually no light or air pollution. I like to lie down in Karen's yard with a bottle of wine and watch the meteor showers, until I remember that Nantucket is the Lyme Disease capitol of the world.

Well, vacation over. Back to the construction site.

I thought I'd post an update on my trials and tribulations with the Insteon home automation network here. A couple of months ago I posted an X10 and Insteon home automation primer. At that point I was just getting into upgrading my problematic X10 stuff here with the newer, wireless Insteon hardware from SmartHome and didn't know how well this stuff would work or what problems I'd find. However I was fed up with X10's flakiness and Insteon looked like an improvement, at least on paper.

I ran into problems with Insteon from the git-go, mostly devices that either didn't work or worked only part-time. I was ready to go back to the toggle switch world. But I decided to forge ahead with the upgrade anyway. I'm glad I did because things magically started working.

I guess what Insteon says is true: the more Insteon devices you have in your network the more reliable it becomes. That's because each Insteon device is also a repeater. For the technophobes, a repeater receives a message and retransmits it for other devices. For the hardcore technophobes, it's like a chain letter, albeit one that floods the network in under 1/10th of a second. The more repeaters in your house, the more reliable Insteon's communications gets.

For instance, last week I did my outdoor Christmas lights. They plug into an outlet inside the garage. I didn't want to have to walk down two flights of stairs, through my very dusty shop and into my cold garage every evening to turn them on and off so I plugged them into a LampLinc device. Then I could control them from the laptop in my office using Insteon's HouseLinc software. Problem was, when I told HouseLinc to "discover" the LampLinc device it couldn't find it on my network. Rats!

Then my kitchen light X10 switch suddenly broke so I replaced it with an Insteon controller. When I went into HouseLinc to add it to the network, voila, there were my Christmas lights too! Since then I've added a couple of more Insteon devices and it's been rock solid reliable ever since.

With two exceptions, that is. Some appliances generate a storm of RF (radio frequency noise) which can interfere with Insteon's wireless operation. X10 suffers from this too, although to a much greater degree than Insteon. My Dewalt battery charger and SlingLink powerline LAN caused any Insteon devices located on the same circuit to go deaf. However, I noticed that after I added a couple of more Insteon devices to the network that the battery charger seems to affect Insteon only occasionally. No matter. The charger will be back downstairs in my shop in a few weeks.

Insteon tells you up front that regardless of the size of your installation you need to install a pair of dedicated repeaters to the network. I did so. But there's one other essential product you need: the aforementioned HouseLinc software and companion USB controller. After learning the software I can't imagine trying to program an Insteon network without it. From your computer you can literally reprogram every Insteon device in the house. When you add a new Insteon device you tell HouseLinc to go look for it. In fact, it automatically "discovers" all unconfigured Insteon devices on your network.

But the software is capable of much more. Check this out: This is HouseLinc's Events screen, which lets you create some pretty complex macros. The screen is self-explanatory however it lets you do stuff with Insteon devices that can't be done without it. For instance, you could program your bedroom lights so that two quick presses will turn off all Insteon devices in the house. Or two quick presses of your entryway Insteon switch will turn on selected lights throughout the house, turn on music in the living room and even (with appropriate hardware) raise the thermostat on the furnace.

HouseLinc also lets you create timed events to, for instance, turn on the porch light and entryway light thirty minutes before sundown. HouseLinc knows your latitude and longitude and it knows the date and time so it knows when sundown occurs in your area.

I also love the fact that I can program every dimmable light to "ramp up" to a preset brightness over, say, 1.5 seconds. Besides the theatrical effect, a light bulb's lifespan increases significantly if it's raised gently to full power. I haven't replaced a single halogen bulb in my kitchen ceiling in almost six years thanks to X10's "soft start".

Anyway, I'm pretty pleased with Insteon so far. I've still got a bunch more devices to install so I'll post updates then.

Chicago 2-Flat tagged me. For those who don't know this Houseblogs game, if you're tagged by another house blogger you're supposed to reveal five things about yourself that most people don't know. Then you tag five other house bloggers.

Because of something I revealed about myself on this blog, I won This Old House Magazine's Stupid Human Trick. So I don't have much of a problem making an idiot of myself for a little attention. The challenge is finding five other house bloggers who haven't been tagged already.

Okay, here goes.

1. I'm an Army brat who was born and partially raised overseas, including three years in Japan. My dad was a JAG who finished his hitch as a bird colonel at the Pentagon. He would have been livid over how the military and its justice system are being abused now. He was also a relentless home tinkerer so this stuff is in my genes, I guess.
2. I'm a former professional musician (bass player). I've played professionally since I was 16 years old and came to NYC from Alexandria, VA at age 19 to be a hired gun. I played on a lot of jingles, demos and toured with some well-known 70s and 80s acts. The highlights of my musician years were playing with George Harrison and Eric Clapton on a Super Session cut (I was in too much awe to speak with them beyond a few babbled questions about the song), jamming with the James Brown Band, playing in the last Christmas show at the Fillmore East and spending a couple of hours in a hotel bar in Cleveland chatting about woodworking with one of my early idols, Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. But, mainly, my livlihood was as a Local 802 hack working in the pits of Broadway rock musicals, including eleven tedious years in Oh! Calcutta! (which is when I decided I needed a career change).
3. Continuing on that thread, only because this is something that very few people know: I was in a studio band with four blond, white guys, including a native Swede, Georg Wadenius. We did all the rhythm section work for a large Latin pop music label. To us, it was just non-union chump change work. We played, they paid us cash, we left. They booked a Saturday at Radio City Music Hall to showcase their talent and called us. I showed up in my ratty black tee shirt and jeans, expecting to be playing off stage, only to find a 40-piece orchestra (which we'd never rehearsed with) and spotlights on each of us because we were one of the featured acts! They had repackaged our dance tracks and released them as an album, calling us "Salsa Gringa, Super Groupo". Both shows were sold out. We had no idea how huge this stuff was in the hispanic world. We were passable salsa dilettantes but I never wanted Tito Puente to hear us.
   
   
   
   
4. While I was scuffling in my early NYC music career I paid the rent by doing carpentry and building maintenance jobs. One of those gigs was set carpenter for a busy porno film studio. Forget the fantasy, guys. It was the most grueling job I'd ever done: 14 hours/day, six days/week under intense pressure ("where's my !#% hospital room set?!!"). Thankfully, Godspell picked me up so I quit after a short time. But it was culture shock going from Caligula to a Jesus rock musical.
5. I'm the only single guy who owns a house in a neighborhood where even childless couples are viewed suspiciously. After seven years here many of my neighbors still believe that I'm a professional house flipper.

Is there a central registry of which bloggers have already been tagged? If not, I tag:

Days' Shore House
Enon Hall
Here Is The House
Hudson River View Restoration
Crazy Stable

BrooklynRowHouse is a diary and photo archive about the renovation of a 1906 Bay Ridge, Brooklyn row house.

Prior to buying the house, I had spent almost all of my adult life living in Manhattan industrial lofts and I was looking for a change. I wanted my own garage for my motorcycles and my very own stoop where I could hang out and chat with neighbors. I wanted to grow tomatoes and live without trucks belching exhaust fumes in my windows.

I was a one-third partner in a Brooklyn Heights restaurant and grew to love Brooklyn more than the Disneyfied makeover that was becoming Manhattan. A couple of restaurant regulars invited me for Christmas dinner at their new house in Bay Ridge and the neighborhood stuck in my craw. Except for the commute, it was exactly what I was looking for. A few months later, they called to tell me about a house around the corner that the owner was thinking about selling. I jumped at it before he got a real estate agent, and before he learned its market value.

You can pick up the rest of the story here.

As for me, I'm a former professional studio, Broadway and road musician (bass, electric bass), recording studio owner and restaurant owner turned technical geek. Since I'm usually the guy holding the camera this is the most recent digital photo I've got of me. This was taken in the paddock at Daytona Speedway before a 146mph sprint. Back before I took on the monumental task of renovating this house I was a passionate motorcyclist. I haven't had much time for that the past few years, which is just as well because I don't heal as quickly as I used to.

Fortunately, I had prior construction experience in my early years as a scuffling musician. I had converted a couple of lofts to residences and built a couple of recording studios so I didn't go into this renovation completely unarmed.

You can pick up the rest of my bio here.

I think the best place to start is at the Renovation Photo Diary. The blog is about current happenings at BrooklynRowHouse.

Enjoy!

Yourself...

Your Buyer...

Your Lender...

Your Appraiser...

Your Tax Assessor...

Your Nosy Neighbor...

Your Historic Preservation Commission...

Your General Contractor

Feb 16-18, 2007
Garden State Exhibit Center
50 Atrium Drive
Somerset, NJ
(exit 19, Route 287)

Sponsored by Wood Magazine

This will be like my 8th or 9th visit to this show. It's like a crack house for woodworking junkies. Every conceivable tool, useful or not, is on display and usually being demonstrated. At least half of my present shop was purchased at one of these shows, including my Delta X Unisaw and Dewalt SCMS. I also load up on all my sandpaper, nitrile gloves and other consumables for the year. The prices are that good.

If there's an answer to my still unanswered question, "what router bits do I need to make bolection moulding?", this is where I'll find it. All the router bit gurus are there from CMT, Freud and Whiteside.

I've never done a seminar there but there are two that are particularly timely for me at this stage of the bedroom reno: Doors & Drawers and Understanding Finishes. Most of the seminars are free, BTW.

Plaid shirt and pot belly optional.

I've got a lunch meeting with a prospective client today so I'll dive into the first priming of the master bedroom project this evening. This gives me an opportunity for some virtual renovation this morning: reading the Houseblogs sites and posting to my own.

Bill over at Enon Hall posted a cool Top Ten list. There are some good tips there. Ya'll should check it out (although my lumberyard likes to see double-spaced, typed materials lists with product codes and a letterhead, preferably faxed in advance).

Since I'm in "wall prep mode" I thought I'd post my own Top Ten in that area. So without further ado...

Top Ten Tips for the Wall Obsessed

1. Scrape the walls thoroughly with a two-inch blade. A wider blade will miss depressions. On plaster, tap the walls lightly. Brown coat plaster which has lost its bonding will sound hollower than the surrounding wall. Paint which is losing its adhesion will have an orange peel look to it.
2. Scrub the walls and ceiling with TSP before you repair them. This will remove airborne grease, oily hand residue, cigarette smoke, etc which can reduce the bonding of your plaster or compound. For enameled walls, sand them lightly to reduce the sheen.
3. Drywall screws leave a sharp rim around the hole which leads to those little round cracks we've all seen before. Before taping, whack each hole with a hammer to dimple them. Do the same with any exposed drywall paper edges that won't be hidden by tape.
4. Prepare plaster cracks by digging a V groove down the center with a beer can opener or painter's 5-in-1 tool. This will remove loose plaster and increase the bonding surface for the repair.
5. For plaster, apply a masonry bonding agent to the immediate repair area. Careful with drips; it's not easy to clean up after it dries.
6. On plaster walls, use plastic adhesive-backed mesh tape to repair cracks. Use plaster at least for the initial coat. Paper tape should not be used on plaster cracks. It's made for drywall, which has built-in expansion seams every four or eight feet. Plaster is a solid wall-to-wall mass which develops stress fractures due to weak points in the framing. The crack is just a symptom. Even after it's repaired it will have a tendency to crack again so you need to use a tape which can take the seasonal expansion and contraction.
7. For either drywall or plaster, make the first coat as thin as possible. Leave just enough plaster/compound under the tape to ensure a good bonding. Use a side light to look for any high spots. Don't obsess over any low ones. You'll fix that in the next coat.
8. Keep your blades clean. I have two sets of knives with one set soaking in a bucket of water. I swap them every fifteen minutes or so.
9. Don't contaminate your joint compound with grit. Never return unused joint compound from your palette or hopper to the bucket. Throw it out. By the same token, avoid returning unused compound from your blade to the palette. Just slap it over the next joint. I like to work with two knives: one for application and one to clean off its blade.
10. Before adding another coat, run a dry blade down the repair to remove any loose compound which could gouge the following coat.

Ten not enough? Good, because here's Rule #0 -- my cardinal rule for wall finishing:

Always work with a side light! This is critical on the final coat and sanding. A side light will reveal high and low spots which will probably show up later under normal room lighting. During sanding, I hold a 100-watt spot light in my left hand and shine it down the repair. It will also show drywall paper that's been roughed up by too-aggressive sanding and which will look terrible if you apply an enamel finish coat.

I'm glad the Somerset Tool Show moved back it to the Exhibit Center because it was suffering at the Ramapo convention center. There were lots of new vendors this year, and lots of new tools.

My primary misson however was finding a router bit to cut the bolection mouldings for the wainscotting in my bedroom reno. The router bit yodas I was counting on for enlightenment were no help. One guy even told me I needed a shaper to get that profile. He must have noticed me looking at him like he had two heads because he followed up with, "...but maybe not."

So I was forced to do hard forensics. After digging through hundreds of bit profiles, I found what I needed at Woodside. Know what? There's nothing special about a bolection moulding. It's just a deep base cap moulding with an "aftermarket" 3/8" rabbet. Doh! Why couldn't I have seen this before?? I bought one and ran a test cut on my router table. It works. Now I have to knock off about 300 linear feet of it.

The tool show usually has a fair amount of vendors selling "miracle" tools which are often little more than homemade jigs constructed from acrylic plastic or billet aluminum. Two bucks worth of material selling for fifty dollars. Who would pay for such things? Probably the same people who buy miracle spark plugs and gasoline additives at car shows.

I spotted one potential huckster two minutes after I got there. He was selling what looked like standard angle iron (albeit made from aluminum) for squaring cabinets during assembly. At first I was amused at the interest he was getting from the crowd until I realized what a brilliantly simple idea it was. Anyone who has dry assembled a cabinet knows what a bitch it is to get the pieces square and to keep them there. Bar clamps usually torque the carcass out of square. Worst case, the whole assembly falls apart just as you're installing the last panel.

What's special about these innocuous brackets is that, unlike stock angle iron, they're dead square to a tolerance of .002". I checked them with an Incra square just to be sure. They also have ears on them which work with spring clamps. Finally, with the aluminum being 3/16" thick it gives the perfect clearance for dry fitting a stained glass or floating panel in a frame before assembling it. So I bought eight of them. I also bought sixteen 2" spring clamps at 99 cents each from Peachtree.

I was also in the market for some long clamps and ran across this nifty product from Bessey called a K-Body Clamp. Besides functioning as a standard bar clamp, they're excellent as a jig for building dead-square cabinet doors and window and picture frames. Tightening/loosening the diagonal corner clamps pulls the object into square while also elevating it above the assembly table so the piece doesn't rack. They can also work as a spreader. This was my big purchase at the show.

Another questionable product was stainless steel sandpaper. The manufacturer claims that it has 30x the life of a standard 5" sanding disk. But it also costs about 50x more.

All in all, it was a great show.

Now the Ugly. With all these purchases, I was lugging around a lot of weight and the exhibit hall doesn't have lockers nor even an attended coat room in which to park your stash. So the exhibitors are usually pretty accommodating about letting you stash your packages with them for pick up before you leave. I had assembled all my bags into one large blue plastic bag and left it with the Peachtree cashier, along with my (very heavy) K-Body clamps. When I returned to pick them up, Joyce offered to carry the big blue bag back to the car while I hauled the clamps. I warned her that the bag was heavy but she said it was nothing. I was impressed!

However, she was right. When I got home I found that that bag had been ransacked by a thief. The 3D squares, several boxes of sandpaper, glue brushes, an auxiliary power switch, several catalogs and some other stuff... all gone. Making matters worse was that my credit card receipts were in those bags.

I called Citibank Mastercard and they canceled the card. But it turned out that my Citicard has purchase theft protection so they credited those losses back to my card! It made the day somewhat less ugly.

Post-Post Mortem: my missing stuff was found! I just got a call from John. It was in his car all along. Joyce had broken my stuff out into two blue bags and one of them had fallen between the seats in his Excursion or something. My faith in humanity just went back up a millimeter.