bigiron

Thanks for the rep. I hope it works out for you.

thanks for the rep. I think there would be a big market for them to get the guys more interested in riding their old ladies.

Thanks, how long and where at Galyans? I worked there 18 years.

Thanks for the rep.

Thank You for the rep, sir.

So far, I have had good luck with the x10 brand although, admittedly, they are the 'cheap' line. The x10.com site is a pain to navigate around in and so, a lot of times, I will look at the various products, brands and features on smarthome.com and then order the items from an ebay storefront for quite a bit less money.
How I got started with this is when we moved into this house, I wanted to put some nice floodlights across the back of the house but we wanted to be able to control them from several different locations.... hard wiring this would have been a pain so I found x10 brand controllers that just fit into the electrical boxes and now can turn on the floods from just about any room inthe house. I can also turn on the barn lights from the house using the same set-up except that controller also has a switch built in to it for local control. There is some talk about some x10 products not working with the compact flourscent bulbs but I have only had one style not work with it out of the half dozen I have switched over. It is also a snap to add in motion detectors and security components that are compatible.
I also have a controller that interfaces with my computer so I set up all my lamp timers on the computer and download them into the controller so it takes the place of timers. It even has a feature that lets me tell it it want this light to come on a half hour before dusk and that light 15 minutes before dawn and give it my geographical location and it makes the necessary calculations as days grow longer or shorter.
It is a neat system but can get overwhelming in it's scope. Imagine... you wish you had a light switch by the doorway of a room for the lamp on the other side of the room.... stick a switch on the wall with double sided tape... no wires and you are good to go!

I am a rookie at this but if you have any questions, I will try to help.

Rocky