I've read all sorts of articles about how people have wired up the heating in their homes to make them controllable. They all seemed terribly complicated. We felt sure there should be an easier way.

When we got our boiler replaced, we asked the heating engineers to put in an extra room thermostat under the stairs in the future node 0. (Of course, there was nothing under there at that time and they thought we were mad.) However, they did install it and so we had two thermostats, either of which could "call for heat".

The plan for control is to turn down the thermostat that is in a sensible position, so that it'll only call for heat if things go horribly wrong. Then we're going to replace the other thermostat with an AD10 X10 din rail switch. When you take the front off, the room stat has three terminals Neutral, Live, and Switched-Live so it's a simple matter (cough I only blew the fuse on the heating once!) of connecting these to the Live In, Neutral and Live Out on the AD10.

Our brief tests show that this works. Now we just need to persuade our electrician that it's a good idea.

Finally, a fine day, so our decorator installed the Solatube. I was entirely taken in by the product literature the moment I read the slogan - "Stick it where the sun don't shine!". Fortunately the tube entirely lives up to my expectations.

It's still a little odd whenever I catch sight of the previously dingy room out of the corner of my eye. As you can see there's still a bit of work to be done before the en suite is ready, so I have a little bit of time to get over it before that room is functional.