Watching Your Home From Afar
With nifty little X10 modules, you can inexpensively control your home appliances over the Web
JEREMY QUITTNER

I want a "smart home" — you know, where the refrigerator talks to the dishwasher and automatically reorders pickles from the Internet grocer when I'm low on cold cuts. The problem is, I want it now, not in the distant future. Perhaps that's why I recently went to the trouble (maybe too much trouble) to wire my home with a system that allows me to control, via the Web, virtually anything that I can plug into an electric outlet.

These days, I can fire up my beloved George Foreman Grill while I'm at work miles away, and get home just as supper is ready. I can even check to make sure my kitchen hasn't burst into flames by viewing grill and galley with a special camera. The whole smarty-pants setup uses a plug-and-play standard known as X10.

There are other, more expensive ways to smarten up your home. Smart America, for instance, produces Thinkboxx, which connects appliances through a central brain in your home's wiring. But a system like this can cost thousands of dollars. As Forrester Research senior analyst Tom Rhinelander says, the more sophisticated stuff is mainly for wealthy consumers. For the rest of us, what's out there "is a gimmick right now."

I think that's a harsh appraisal of X10, which has been around for two decades and has legions of fans. The system relies on transistor radio-size modules that plug into any standard electric socket. Appliances in turn plug into the modules. You can use either a handheld remote control or a personal computer to send signals to the plug-in boxes, so you can do things like turn lights on and off without getting up from the sofa. Be warned, though, that while the X10 is relatively cheap, geeks will enjoy the complexity of its setup more than the rest of us will.

Not surprisingly, the best place to begin is X10 Inc., which offers all the definitive elements of home-automation hardware, software and gadgetry. You'll also need to visit Keware Technologies Inc., which makes an $80 piece of software called Homeseer that allows you to control your network remotely, over the Web.

For me, setting up an X10 network was a confusing and frustrating process that took days. For $50, you can buy X10's starter kit, ActiveHome, which includes two plug-in control modules and a computer cable that plugs into another module at the PC. The software interface pulls up images of switches that you can assign to your devices. HomeSeer does much the same thing, generating a home page in seconds that allows you to control your X10 devices from the Web.

Unfortunately, I needed lots of tech help to get my laptop to control the appliance network. I will spare you the mind-numbing details (a port on my laptop needed to be activated, among other things). And I needed even more help to get HomeSeer to remotely control the network, since at work I was behind a firewall. The HomeSeer interface, by the way, comes with an annoying talking genie that snores when you aren't launching commands. But that, happily, is in my past — all I need to worry about now is my repast. That, and figuring out how to clean the dishes remotely.

JEREMY QUITTNER is a free-lance writer who lives and works in New York City END