James Sentman: DIY Appliance Module #1

Read Me First

The information on this page involves deadly line voltages as well as creating things that are not approved for connecting to your house wiring. If you're not comfortable and experienced with the precautions and things you need to know to do this safely then don't do it. This page does not try to be a how to for saftey and general electric know-how.

Motivation

I needed to be able to switch some Compact Florescent bulbs via X10. The standard inexpensive X10 wall switch does not do this well for reasons well documented on other X10 hacking websites. I was unhappy with the prospect of paying 3 to 5 times the price for a switch to do it properly.

There are several pages that have information on tapping the SCR driving voltage inside the X10 WS467 and using that to drive an SSR (solid state relay) so I thought I'd be able to get this to work. So I ordered a bunch of these:

hoping to connect them up to the $12 wall switch to make an inexpensive silent switch. This didn't go quite as well as I had hoped. I did manage to get this to work, but it was a much larger amount of work than I hoped and didn't want to repeat it several more times. I needed one more relatively quickly and as I sat around trying to get the energy to rip apart another wall switch I realized I had another device that could give me an X10 controlled, low voltage source to turn the ssr on. Quite a while ago I had ordered an extra one of these:

These are the transformers that X10 ships with their remote cameras. They output about 12v so I added a 1k 1/2watt resisiter to drop the output to just over 5volts. The SSR's control voltage needs to be between 5 and 10 volts. I probably could have just left it alone, but I had these around so I added it.

Connect the 2 together, add a couple of good crimped and soldered connectors for the load side and you're all set to go. In my case I'm switching a few CF's and under 100 watts. At this wattage in testing the case did not even become noticibly warmer than the desk it was sitting on. If you're really going to run 10 amps through it you'll need to clamp it to something to take the heat away!

In my case I just wrapped it in several layers of electrical tape and stuffed it into the electrical box. The control wire sneaks out the bottom of the switchplate and goes to the transformer. This is really more of the built in type of controller rather than a switch as there is no local control and it wouldn't work hanging out of a normal switch. But for my application it works fine.

UPDATE: 10/17/2003

Turned out that this was not as good a solution as I thought. Turns out that the SSR I used, or some combination of it and other things and the lights that I was controlling caused a lot of noise on the AC line and when these lights were on only about half of any other X10 signal would get through. So I've had to remove this little hack and actually purchase a real life CF capable X10 switch.

Even so I have a few of these things still around and will continue to experiment with them in the future. I think that a choke like the ones that X10 includes inside their own switches will probably be useful to filter the output and keep any noise under control. I have a couple of these left over from some X10 wall switches that didn't survive after some other experiments and I'll give them a try in the not too distant future.