We live in the Santa Cruz mountains, and the power up there is bad (overhead lines, trees that fall down, etc.). So we tend to get power outages, particularly in the winter.

Unfortunately, consumer electronics are not designed with power outages in mind. Instead, they are often designed to come back on when power is restored. This is okay in some cases, but very bad in the case of a plasma TV, because when a static image is displayed on a plasma TV for a couple of hours, it burns the image into the TV permanently, destroying it.

We already lost one plasma TV this way!

I want to protect our new TV with a simple device that won’t send power to the TV until I press a reset button.

The device would have the following states:

* No power in house: no power to TV
* Power in house, reset button not pressed: no power to TV
* Power in house, reset button pressed: power to TV

It’s a very simple device, but I have not been able to find one off the shelf. All of the X10 power controllers I've seen (and I've called a number of vendors) restore themselves to their previous state when powered on, so if they were powering the TV when the power went out, they'll restore power to the TV when PG&E restores power to the house.

Can someone on this forum help me solve this problem using X10? I can write software (including assembly code) if that's necessary, but I would need some guidance about what programmable controller to get, etc.