Although I am a morning person, I still need a little help waking up in the morning. My lovely children help a bit but being able to have the lights gradually brighten to full brightness when it is time to get up helps a lot, particularly in the winter. It also means that the children wake up at the same time every day, which in turn means they tend to go to sleep pretty reliably in the evening. In the event that they wake up too early, they know it's too early as the lights aren't on yet so generally don't wake us.

We also have X10 Motion Sensors so can automatically trigger lights in rooms with no natural light. Our utility room, where we change nappies, is a good example as this behaviour is particularly useful when you have your hands full carrying a reluctant toddler.

The children rather like the low-level stick-on X10 RF Remotes that enable them to turn on their lights (and I like the fact that they don't have to climb on the furniture to reach the "normal" switches). (They also like having the remotes trigger wolf howls, T-Rex roars and Michael Rosen from the ceiling speakers.)

One disadvantage of the dimmable lights is that most dimmers have a minimum rating. The LD11 X10 DIN-mounted Lamp Modules that we use require a minimum load of 60W. This is a problem because it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy bulbs that meet this requirement. At the moment, we typically use Energy Saver GLS Lamps which look great and use just enough power to keep the dimmers happy.

I'd be very interersted to know how others with X10 solve this problem as I'd love a solution that used less power but which was still dimmable and produced a pleasant bright light.

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.

The natural extension of this using the new X10 lighting is to have the same "On" button triggering a sequence of light settings - a "scene". So now the "On" signal triggers a simple sequence of commands:

x10 turn l_landing on
x10 turn l_bed_2 on
x10 turn l_bath on

They set the scene for going up to bed. Later, the "Off" signal triggers a second sequence:

x10 turn j1 lightsoff
x10 turn l1 lightsoff

That is the X10 magic necessary to turn off any lights we happened to leave on anywhere in the house. This is great! No more going back to the bottom of the stairs to switch of the hall light.

It's great to see how even simple things like this are coming together. Things should really pick up now that the first phase of electrical work is coming to an end. (Phase two will be the new fan/light for node 0 and phase three will be the en-suite electrics - i.e. underfloor warming, demister, fan, etc.)

We've set up some neat controls based on this Colour Wheel.

Tracy's ChromaDome, from A.C. Lighting, arrived this week. It's going to be really neat when we have this installed lighting the tall space above the stairs.

Since we're sold on the Pulsar Chroma range now, I cancelled the outstanding order for the DMX pinspot. (I don't blame 10outof10 for not completing the order because I was told by other suppliers that they were impossible to get hold of when I placed the order in July.) Now we just need to decide what Chroma lights we are going to use to bring colour to the white walls of the kitchen.

They look great.

I can't wait to see them in the en-suite shower. They are brighter than I expected which is good because it means we should get away with just two for the shower leaving a couple spare for elsewhere.

I decided to experiment creating a small video. It works on my Linux box but might not be useable on Windows.

I discovered the DMX standard which is used for stage and disco lighting and also increasingly for architectural lighting. Trouble is, much of it is quite pricy. Pulsar do a nice range of LED lighting - the Chroma Range. This includes some very nice looking medium-sized lights and some small MR16 lights. You need to buy an external controller for DMX which makes it pretty expensive. The main thing that puts me off is that there's no low cost way of trying this out, just to run a single MR16 fixture I need a controller costing several hundred pounds. The MR16 bulbs are controlled by 0-10v for each colour so there might be a way of controlling them directly, but that sounds like a lot of trouble.

There are some cheapish remote control LED MR16 lights, but we're mostly avoiding IR for control and it's pretty hard to do central control in a reliable way.

There's also the Mirage LED light from NJD which has built-in DMX. This has a built-in fan which might make a bit of noise (though NJD say it's pretty quiet). This is reasonably priced, but it's quite a big fixture. We might look at this in the future.

Recently, I saw some reasonably priced LED PAR 36 lights (these are small DJ/stage lights) on eBay. This lead me to investigate a bit more and I found similar Showtec LED PAR 36 lights for 50 GBP + vat. They look slightly industrial, but come in chrome and shouldn't look out of place in our house (we don't exactly go it for country cottage style). These have DMX built-in, so no need for an expensive controller.

I'd already looked in to how to control DMX lighting from a computer. Milford Instruments do controller boards, that allow you to send DMX commands through a serial port.

DMX lights are connected in a daisy chain. DMX has 512 channels and each fixture responds only to the commands on its channels. Each fixture may have a number of channels for controlling different colours and other features such as pan and tilt. This approach means that you can control a large number of lights from a single control board. (DMX does support multiple 'universes' if you need more that 512 channels, but I don't think we're likely to get there ;-)

We've ordered one of the lights plus a DMX cable and the DMX control board. The board turned up yesterday and we're waiting (impatiently) for the light.

Today we decided to try unplugging the electrical items that we had recently added to the house and see if any of those made a difference. We unplugged lots of things one at a time and nothing made a difference. Then we unplugged the remaining items upstairs - and everything started working again. We plugged the items back in one by one, and everything still worked. We're none the wiser as to what was causing the problem.

When it next happens, which we're pretty sure it will, we'll make sure we unplug devices one at a time. If we can identify the culprit then an X10 plug-in filter might help.

At least we know it's not a problem with the Harmony module.