Keeping lights off at night

I think you're in the wrong group. This sounds more like a discipline problem than home automation. try carrotstick.dr_spock

It's less costly than shooting him, and I presume the issue is that he isn't responding to previous training approaches, so why not? Make it every hour, and sequence through them so he isn't caught in total darkness.

He'll either get the point, go to bed, or deal with it, and those are all good outcomes.

-John O

Just put a load sensor in his bed, once it senses a load & the time is before you are scheduled to awake then issue a all lights off command on X10.

I doubt it affects it much unless all your heating and cooking isnt electric.

Shooting him when he forgets the next time would work |-)

Not every easily with that particularly situation.

Yes, but if you can have it turn them off after he is guaranteed to have gone to bed, the worst that can do is have him turn them on again if he chooses to stay up all night etc.

Yes, but that's likely to piss him off completely and dont forget that he will be picking your nursing home.

It is theoretically possible to have a system that works on movement detectors and which turns the lights off when he goes to his room, after a delay of say 15 mins, so he only has to turn them on again manually if he leaves his room again after longer, and only say after some time like 12 pm so it doesnt happen in the evening.

Its possible to have completely automatic lighting too so room lights are turned off when no one is in a particular room for longer than a set time.

Thats very nice to use, but isnt that cheap.

I'm thinking about all that lawyer crap. ;-)

In the meantime, maybe son will give Dad some grandkids, and Grand Dad will watch them when Son and SWMBO need some alone time. Son will forget about this after SWMBO has her way.

-John O

I doubt it, bullets are cheap.

Not when he remembers that when picking your nursing home |-)

Thats not going to be very effective if he lies on his bed much for other than sleeping. Plenty of kids do.

He wanders into his room at say 8pm, lies on the bed, and all the house lights go off. Not very viable.

Nope, perfectly viable to automate house lights to allow for the occupant's behaviour.

Completely automatic house lights would be fine, just not that cheap.

Yes, that would work. Would be interesting if I could log when he went to bed each night too, though I don't know if X10 is capable of doing that...

So just set the rule to use a window of time; not before XXpm and not after XXam.

Or perhaps better yet, on sensing the load, do a lookup of existing devices (or a light sensor) and either turn the others off automagically or do some other signalling in the kid's room.

Easily avoided by blaming it on a burglar |-)

I doubt it. Many never forget what was done to them when kids.

Well, devices exist to do simple on/off switching and relay controlling. You could use any sort of contact closure circuit to monitor whatever sensors needed. Motion, light, load, anything that can close a circuit could be used. Combine that with a controller system that has some programmability and you can probably do all sorts of things. Homeseer on a PC is pretty easy to program. A sensor closing a contact could send an X-10 signal that homeseer picked up. At that point you could run any scripts needed. Not only to control the lights but also to log the timestamp.

Not sure its going to be practical to set the XXpm at any particular value if he goes to sleep very late but spends quite a bit of the time late watching TV on his bed, but still walks around the house for stuff to eat etc late.

Fully automatic house lights based on movement sensors make a lot more sense. Those work when getting up for a piss etc too and can be dimmed so you dont get dazzled.

Yes, the PC X10 software can log events.

He may not be too thrilled about being monitored tho and dont forget who will be picking your nursing home |-)

Charge him $5 every time he leaves the lights on at night. His memory will improve dramatically, almost overnight.

I think that's the wrong question, unless you are only interested in an X10 solution for some other reason, even if a non-X10 solution might happen to be better for this problem.

Seems to me that it's not that you don't want the lights on at night (you probably do, rather than have someone fall down the stairs in the dark), but rather you don't want the lights on when there's no one about to benefit from them. This would seem to me to be an ideal case for occupancy sensors, which automatically switch on the lights when they detect movement and the light level is low, and automatically switch them off some configurable time after last movement detected.

In the UK, these are available in a number of different forms. Examples are ceiling mounted 360º PIR format, wall mounted 120º format (usually used outdoors), and replacement wall plate switch format. These all switch the mains directly without any type of remote signalling.

Now you could use X10 to do this, but that would really only make sense as part of a more comprehensive home automation setup. It's overkill to solve only the problem you describe.