LifeLongWNYer
Well-known member
I am taking care of a house in which no one currently lives, while the liars, oops the lawyers, figure out the estate. It is starting to get dark here earlier and I thought that to confuse the local bad guys, I'd use an X10 controller to switch on and off lights in different parts of the house to make it look ( a little ) like someone is living there.
All went well for a month, or until the first electric bill arrived. When I saw it, I thought there WAS some one living in the place. So, I bought a bunch of CFL's and planned to save a ton of money.
Well, at first, all appeared well. But then I noticed, when I stopped in to check the place, that the CFL's weren't behaving. Some never turned on. Others turned on okay, but didn't go OFF, rather they flickered dimly when they were supposed to be off.
To try some basic trouble shooting, I began replacing the CFL's with the incandescents, and they worked okay. I cheated on the lights on the front of the garage, and got the CFL's on the outside to work by putting a keyless socket on the inside and screwing a 15w incandescent in it, with the fixture wired with the lamps on the exterior. Then they behaved, but I was using and extra 15 watts inside the garage, that I didn't need, so there went half of my savings!
So I'm kind of thinking that my experience with the garage light tells me that in order for the X10 to work with CFL's, I need a "ballast" incandescent in each fixture to make the X10 work.
Has anyone else had the same experience? I hate to put a two-bulb "Y" in each lamp with a small incandescent bulb in it just to make the X10 AND the CFL work, I might as well have just left all the original incandescents in place. Plus, in many lamps, the "Y", a CFL and an incandescent won't all fit.
Anybody have any ideas?
.
All went well for a month, or until the first electric bill arrived. When I saw it, I thought there WAS some one living in the place. So, I bought a bunch of CFL's and planned to save a ton of money.
Well, at first, all appeared well. But then I noticed, when I stopped in to check the place, that the CFL's weren't behaving. Some never turned on. Others turned on okay, but didn't go OFF, rather they flickered dimly when they were supposed to be off.
To try some basic trouble shooting, I began replacing the CFL's with the incandescents, and they worked okay. I cheated on the lights on the front of the garage, and got the CFL's on the outside to work by putting a keyless socket on the inside and screwing a 15w incandescent in it, with the fixture wired with the lamps on the exterior. Then they behaved, but I was using and extra 15 watts inside the garage, that I didn't need, so there went half of my savings!
So I'm kind of thinking that my experience with the garage light tells me that in order for the X10 to work with CFL's, I need a "ballast" incandescent in each fixture to make the X10 work.
Has anyone else had the same experience? I hate to put a two-bulb "Y" in each lamp with a small incandescent bulb in it just to make the X10 AND the CFL work, I might as well have just left all the original incandescents in place. Plus, in many lamps, the "Y", a CFL and an incandescent won't all fit.
Anybody have any ideas?
.
I had a bunch of this stuff (including security, motion, wall switches etc. and removed 100% of it. Their signaling tech is very prone to interference from your panel, and from others in your neighborhood. Zwave, Zigbee, or Leviton's proprietary are much better.