Marko @ X10 - A web producer blog

Hi all.

Here’s the “Kraut” writing again. You may think, “Man, this guy is working late!”, but I am sitting home, drinking an ice cold beer on this beautiful summer evening. My choice of beer tonight is a Weinhardt’s Private Reserve, quite good beer I have to say. I believe the American beer situation has improved a lot since I first started visiting this country. Nothing beats self-brewed beer of course, but I got behind on my private little brewery for some weeks now.

I have quite a nice beer production setup in my garage, naturally fully automated. It not only switches the lights on as soon as I open the door, I even hooked up one of X10’s Protector Plus Home Security Systems to alarm me if someone gets the crazy idea to break into my brewery, uh, garage I mean. I still need a camera and some software to be able to check on it whenever, from wherever (I hope my boss reads this…cameras, alright?).
I could then hunt down possible thieves. Yeah, trust me, steal beer from a German and he’ll hunt you down!

When producing web sites the first thing one needs to do is to get to know the product. My first product was exactly that, a Protector Plus Security System. At first I thought, “What the heck am I going to do with it?”

Like many houses these days mine came with a security system. Of course, it's unmonitored. Who wants to pay $30 or more per month for some company to monitor the system? Still, at first, I tried to be good about using the preinstalled system anyway, but I could never remember the damn codes (there is one to activate it, and another one to deactivate!). In addition I had to rush myself, wife, and kids out of the house every morning, making sure the alarm wouldn’t go off, which it did frequently. Furthermore, my wife is very good at forgetting little things JUST after we are out of the house. So I had to rush back in, trying to remember the code, hopefully deactivate it, and then activate it again.

Well, then I started to play around with the Protector Plus system, which was a gift from my employer to get to know the product (Thank You!). I loved the remotes that came with it right from the beginning; now I could easily activate and deactivate the alarm (there even was an extra keychain remote for my wife). Setting it up was a breeze, took maybe 20 minutes.

The best of it though is that I have a supervised system now. I mean really, what does a monitoring company like ADT or Brinks do? Alarm goes off, they call, nobody answers, and they call authorities. My system calls up to four people, even cell phones, then the Protector Plus acts just like a two-way radio, you can actually hear what’s going on in the house (e.g. “Sorry honey, I forgot to push the button on the remote.”) . So, I avoid false alarm charges, I save those monitoring fees, and I know my beer is safe without having to remember any codes! I like X10!

I can’t go without linking to one of my sites. Seriously, compare for yourself. I and my team created some very honest comparison charts, telling the truth about monitored systems vs. Protector Plus. We’re Do-It-Yourselfers, right? Well, then monitor yourself!

Here’s the link:
http://www.x10securitysystems.com/compare.html

For an in-depth ADT comparison go here:
http://www.x10securitysystems.com/compare_adt.html

If you’re wondering about Brinks check this out:
http://www.x10securitysystems.com/compare_brinks.html

Here's a picture of the base system that I have:

Okay, that’s it from me for tonight. Try to enjoy this nice evening!

Marko