"Periodically over the past few months unfamiliar sounds would awaken me or my wife in the middle of the night" X10 customer Rick Baldwin told us. "We would get up to check it out, but could never find anything."

Needless to say, after a while this became a little unnerving. It's one thing to hear a noise, but it's quite another to continue hearing the noise and not be able to place it. And Rick knew that it couldn't be just him since his wife was being wakened as well. So between them they had to agree, there was definitely a noise. But what or where was the noise coming from?

So Rick purchased an ActiveHome Kit from X10. The first thing he did was set up the motion detectors throughout the house. He then set each one to trip a lamp as soon as it detected any motion, so that he and his wife would be able to identify the noise and catch the noisemaker red-handed.

Imagine their surprise one night when one of the bedroom lights suddenly came on in the middle of the night. And there was Rick's intruder, flying about their bedroom. "We had a friendly bat that would come to visit from time to time," Rick said.

The bat had no malicious intent; he was just out exploring and looking for food. Of course, he also had no way of knowing that his presence was unsettling to the occupants of the room he was flying around in. But he was welcome, as long as he announced himself, which thanks to motion sensors in the ActiveHome kit, he now did every time he entered the room.

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