Death and taxes are familiar to most, but the third thing that you can reliably count on is an email from Brian Edwards every night just after midnight. X10.com always has some special running.

And it's usually a good promotion, but their selection is really limited. Smarthome.com has better variety, but not the best prices. And I've heard good things about of homeautomationnet.com, but haven't investigated yet.

Any other good sources for home automation stuff? The next thing for me will probably be voice control, so I'd like to find good prices on that equipment.

-Neil.

Neil,

We have 1 HAL2000 left on closeout if you’re interested. Brian can be shut off or at least toned down by clicking on the bottom of his message. I finally went to once a week, but he does make you feel wanted.

Bill
www.homeautomationnet.com

Y'know, I never really read that far down on his emails. They're way too long for something that gets sent out every night.

Not sure I want to go with HAL yet. So far I've experimented a bit with HomeSeer, and I like it, but then I ran into other problems with reliability and I want to sort that out first.

Another confusion is that the homebuilders took over the house for the last week to finally resolve a number of problems existing since I moved in a couple months ago. So automation has had to be shelved for a while.

Neil, if it helps any, I got extraordinarily good service from Bill and homeautomationnet.com. My stuff got here on a rocket ship as opposed to the elderly snail that delivered some stuff I ordered from x10.com.

HTH,
- Ray

What problems were you having with HomeSeer?

That wasn't written too clearly was it? Oops. I meant that I ran into reliability problems with rudimentary X10 components itself, not with HomeSeer, so I shelved the HomeSeer experimentation for now. I was using a HomeSeer demo so that's probably expired by now.

As for the X10 reliability probs, my few timed lights would not reliably switch on/off as programmed. I saw a post from someone else re: ActiveHome reliability probs (same probs I had), and the suggested cure was to disconnect the cable from the interface when the computer end is disconnected. That seems to have solved my prob for now, but I'll let it run for a few more days to ensure that its really solved.