I'm rebuilding a house from the ground up after a fire.
I was getting enchanted with the whole X-10 idea until reading many of the posts on a.h.a and c.h.a. Since I'm starting from nothing, would I be better off just going hardwire controls for everything?
If so, what kind of equipment am I looking for?
I want to use a lot of flourescent lighting and have it be controllable -- am I looking to create a disaster by trying to use X-10? It certainly seems from reading posts that flourescent lighting and X-10 are like cats and dogs.
I primarily want to control lighting, insulating shutters, fans and dampers, monitor thermistors embedded in solar mass and use to turn on and off radiant hot water heating. I'll have some cat5E running around for a lan in the house. I don't much care about distributing audio and video, but guess I should make some accomodation for it to make the house nicer for the next guy.
I'm going to have a photo-voltaic grid-tied system. Assuming I end up using X-10 for some of the lighting control, should I expect the inverter to cause problems for the X-10 signals?
Again assuming X-10, I plan to have a whole-house blocker/phase-coupler. Would tieing the PV feed on the utility side of the blocker solve inverter noise problems?
I'm at the stage where I need to learn a lot in a fairly short amount of time. I'll sure appreciate some suggestions about where I should concentrate my study.
Thanks
Best regards, Dennis