has anyone used x10 to control a telephone line? my wife said when she was a teen, her father (an x10 junkie from the 70's and 80's) had her phone line in her room on a timer so that it turned off at 10 pm. could he have used the universal module and control it with an x10 timer(like the rest of his house). any ideas would be great. i have to control the line in my son's room.

I assume you could wire the telephone signal through an X-10 Universal Module to shut it off and on at will!

David
www.BlueDo.com

You can always buy a used coin operated pay telephone and put it in the teenagers room, this would encourage your son to get a job! (Then you could charge for boarding & meals too!)

i wish my boys would get a job! one of them is 14 so he is screwed cause people don't usually hire that young. my 16 year old has to take 2 semesters of summer school AND and adult ed class to catch up for his sophmore year(and be eligible for football). so there is no working for him, either. as far as the telephone goes, i think i'm going to re-wire the whole house to a central equipment area(the basement) and set up some universal modules for my boy's rooms.

I just got finished building a phone controller out of two appliance modules. It's sort of a hack but it works well enough. not sure if it somehow might be violating some phone rules though.

send me an email if you're interested in knowing how i came up with it, otherwise i also found a product online that costs about 20 bucks or so that does just what you want.

latres!
thomas
catalysttgj@sbcglobal.net

Simple aproach, the phone wire that goes upto your son's room first goes through a DPDT switch. The green and red wires are all you need to concern yourself with, you can simply cap off the black and yellow (Blue and white if pressent too) wires. The switch will allow you to break contact between your son's phone and the ouside world.

The more complex aproach would be to use an X-10 controled switch to do the same switching function.

how so?

Don't encourage it, ask David at Bluedo.com.
(Or anyone else for that matter.)

sorry, it was a monday. i wasn't thinking :)

Typical. G50AE is saying, "the specific answer to your question is more complex." In other words, he will stray from topic, suggest something not asked...this time he goes so far as to suggest that your original question is not worth answering because (sob!) it is TOO DIFFICULT ! ! !

Okay, I hardly know X-10 stuff at all, but here goes: your answer is an X-10 module that opens and closes a relay. Of course, you can't just put the phone signal through a normal X-10 device, because then it would be connected to the 120 volt line, right? So...the worst and kloogiest thing you could do would be a 120 volt relay connected to an X-10 switch that can handle inductive loads. For more sophistication, I know from seeing an install a friend did about ten years ago that there are X-10 dry contact switches (i.e. relay contacts that just switch, with the module itself not putting any voltages on any of the contacts). Connect the phone line through one of these and control with the timer of your choice.

For that matter, how about a dumb Radio Shack 24-hour timer with a 120 volt relay connected to it? You set the start and stop time, and only check on it occasionally to see if your kid has stolen the OFF pegs!

Another approach would be to tell the teen that no calls are allowed after 10pm and violation results in removal of the phone. Saves lots of wiring.

Damn, you are so right! It also shows the teen that a parent can have convictions and character, which helps the teen develop them himself. He will hate it and fight it, which is where the parent's conviction and character are needed to keep him from giving in.

Screw the wiring. Be a parent!

I don't know about that, the way the courts are skewed the teen could hire a lawyer and sue you. Then you would have to ask the "kid" for permission to use your own phone (and maybe the bathroom too).

I provided the original poster with a solution to his problem, restricting access by a teenager to the phone lines. This solution is one I have personally helped impliment on a few occations. I did not stray from the topic as you incorrectly stated.

I did not suggest that his question was not worth answerring, nor have I ever done so. In fact I have gone out of my way on several occations to provide new material to help answer questions contained in older threads that are still relivant to reccurring questions.

Therein lies the problem!

MTC: Don't "go out of your way", just GO AWAY!