For the past ten years almost every light in my house has been controlled by X-10. When I installed the system there was not much else available that was not extremely expensive.
I have installed a coupler, repeaters, and filters, and it is fairly reliable, but I expect not sufficiently reliable that I would still be using it if I were married.
I have never been in your trade, but if I were, I think I would find a more reliable system to install for a customer.
The worst thing about it for a mission critical system is not that a load sometimes fails to respond to a switch, but that sometimes a switch will turn on a load for no reason that one can find. Last year my dinning room light came on during the night for no reason that I could find. Over the years, I have had that experience with one or two other lights.
I did not think that could happen before it happened to me as a X-10 signal is a rather long binary string of about 22 bits as I recall and one might think the probability of a false signal about as likely as guessing the combination to a bank vault, but it has happened to me and a number of other people.
In the past few years there have been a number of other power line control systems brought to market in an attempt to overcome the shortcomings of X-10. I am not too familiar with most of them except I see that the one made by Smarthome has their usual quality control problems.
I am not yet convinced that any system that does not use a dedicated hardwire is going to work first time, every time. Which is what one would wantin order to avoid service calls from less than happy customers.
For more information then I can provide, you might want to check the forums at:
[Link: cocoontech.com]Good luck.
