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I have a new bare apartment due soon to work with. It's my first time investigating home automation but all I come up with are home automation products for incandescent lighting. Yet all my rooms have main fluorescent lights. Do I just have bad luck and somehow googled only incandescent light home automation? Or is this how the current home automation industry is?

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I know that a part of many home automation controls are built in dimmer switches to control the level of lighting. You can't use a dimmer control with florescent light fixtures. The alternative is to use an appliance control instead. An appliance control is on/off only, and this will work with flourescent light fixtures.

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I'm not sure what products you have been looking at, but I've had good luck with SmartHome's Insteon product line. For non-dimmable florescent lights, you want the relay switches. They allow you to turn lights on and off, but not dim them.

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Thanks, I looked into those but the electricity here is 220v/50hz, I don't think Insteon supports 220/50 yet. So far I've only found X10 and Zwave which do. The home automation project is for a 200 square meter apt. For now, I'm leaning towards the X10 which should be adequate for the purpose of the budget conscious newcomer hobbyist. – Level1Coder Nov 1 '10 at 2:17

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