Homeowner Forum / Home Automation / July 2008

Thanks, Bruce. Thanks for your help on the other thread too.

While I was waiting, I called Leviton and asked the same thing. It was your
answers that helped me understand theirs. The rep vacillated on the point
about protecting the switch while emphasising the "safety" aspect. It didn't
take a rocket scientist to realize that he"had" to state the party line
about protecting the switch.  It just irks me that features like this are
added because of our litigative society that believes that caution and
common sense are someone elses responsibility.

I would say there's probably more to the addition of the cutoff switch than
that.  If a bulb is going to fail dramatically, it's likely to do so the
first time it's turned on.  The normal expectation of someone changing a
bulb is that if it's off, it will stay off.

With X-10's current sensing feature, installing a new bulb without the
safety slide switch means that your hands and face are probably going to be
very close to the bulb when it lights up for the first time.  That increases
the chances that any serious failure (like a bad vacuum seal) will cause
personal injury.  It's probably always a good idea to fire a new light bulb
remotely.  I'd venture that even the startle reaction from a flare type
burnout could knock someone off a ladder.

Another reason for the slide cutoff is so that if you're going away for a
while and have torchiere lamps or other devices connected to the wall switch
that you don't want coming on for any reason you can manually prevent them
from activating via powerline commands, phantom or real, until you return.

IIRC, those slide switches appeared when X-10 changed from the flip paddle
to the push-button design and were necessary to retain all the functionality
of the previous paddle version.  Those older switches could be set in the
OFF position where they would not respond to X-10 commands.  The downside,
of course, was that if they were remotely turned off by X-10 powerline
commands when in the ON position, they had to be double flipped to get the
light to come on.

I also imagine, as was stated before, that positive manual shut-off was
probably a condition of UL approval.

--
Bobby G.

Never caused a problem with the switch or