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Toddler clock update

Posted on January 19, 2009 at 16:14:31 by chris

As mentioned in an earlier post, we have a night light on a socket timer to let Oscar know when it's time to get up, or if he should stay in bed (and not bother us).

This actually seems to work fairly well. Although there are exceptions, most mornings I now get up at 7:30 when I hear him call out "Daddy the green light's on, Daddy!" Usually when he wakes up earlier he's happy to chat to himself until the light does come on.

Although this works, one improvement would be to be able to adjust the time the light comes on without going into his room. So we're moving towards phase 2: plugging the night light into an X10 appliance module, with an X10 alarm clock (by my bedside).

The first try didn't work very well - it turns out that some power is still supplied to whatever's plugged in to the appliance module even when it's supposed to be off, which is enough to make the (very low power) night light come one partly (enough to be easily visible in the dark) anyway. After a bit of web research it sounds like this is so that the module can turn on automatically when the appliance's own power switch is turned on. Maybe a handy feature, but not what I want here!

The next thing to try is a "second generation" X10 module, which sounds like it may leak less power to the light when off. One's on order, so there'll be another update when it comes in.