>    Hi Kathy.  We've considered using the X-10 stuff here to control our
>birdroom lights & heat eventually but have heard that in conditions where
>electrical service is interrupted they tend to come back on in an ON state
>and we were afraid that with the storms we have here from time to time we'd
>lose power during the middle of the night and when it came back on again all
>of the lights would come on and startle the birds and disrupt their routine.
> Have you had any problem with this or was our information entirely wrong?
I haven't had a power outage in a long time (we've been lucky), but I
think the lights come back on in the same state they were when the power
went down. That is, if they were off when the power went down, they
don't come back on. The lights are run by individual modules that
are controlled by the timer. If the modules are in the 'off' position, I
don't think that a power out changes that until triggered by the timer.
What happens in an outage is that the clock timer loses the time (just
as a normal electronic clock would--it goes back to 12 midnight). The
on-off timer settings are also reset to midnight, and the lights just
don't come back on until they're manually turned back on and the timers
are re-set.
But if the lights were ON when the power went down, then they'd come
back ON when the power was restored.
I'm think what happened last time we had an outage is that the lights
were on when we lost power, they came back on when it was restored, then
they didn't shut off at the correct time because the timer was no longer
set. So the birds got a later than usual bedtime that night.
As for disrupting their routine, I've not seen anything like that bother
them. Even when I had to go into their room and turn on a light abruptly
at 3 am (for a problem with something else), they got annoyed but it
didn't seem to bother them long-term.
--Kathy
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