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The nice thing about x10 is that most of the commands were idempotent. As such, I would send every signal once a second for 10 seconds. Usually the light came in within 3-5 seconds but sometimes it would be 10 seconds.

I have my old flat in 2000(ish) fully linked. This. Included PIR sensors, door sensors, and lamps, lights. I also had. The heating fitted with an x10 switch. This meant that I could turn the heating on and my kettle on remotely on the way home from work.

X10 was nice that it could communicate through main, but when I started to use Ethernet over power, it stopped working. It also was one-way. There was no confirm or status from the switch devices.

I looked into it a few years ago when the radio-based stuff was still fairly immature/expensive, and it seemed like it was super low bandwidth. Like, fine for on/off operations, but not really fast enough to do things like have a light track a dimmer.