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I've been looking to get into central lighting and home automation but haven't put the time into researching it adequately.

While I'd like to have the expandability of using linux to control the whole system I'll probaby go for a commercial system. I ran a linux system for years but eventually I came to realise that it just sucked away too much of my life. I lost a couple of the hard drives recently and haven't bother to patch the system back up kind of wasteful to leave my computer on 24/7 in anycase.

Even though wireless is nice in an existing home in a new home I'd prefer to go for a fully wired solution. Wireless takes more power and is less reliable than wired. Do you know if instaon has cat5 wired switches? Also I am a little paranoid that someone could just scan the frequency and start messing with my head by turning things on and off from outside my house. I would like to have a remote control that I could use to turn on my lights and being able to ssh into my home machine and turn up the heat would be great too or the cell phone interface you talked about in cases where I don't have computer access.

I would also like to have a central heating system where I could setup profiles and have those profiles used to control each heating zone instead of having seperate programmable thermostats for each heating zone. So I may eventually have to go with a linux solution just to be able to put all the pieces together but what I hope is that a commercial solution will come out that will be equivalent to the linux machine just as hardware routers have replaced the need to use a linux machine to act as your firewall.

ps. you have a great site and I've read all of your woodworking renovation material. Great work!! Keep it up!!