Decent Motion Sensing Lights?

Above asks: "At my previous house I purchased a number of motion sensor lights to replace the standard flood lights. I simply went to the nearest Home Depot and bought a mid range model, and they worked great. Since then I've moved, and in the new house I did the same, and got some Heath-Zenith units from Home Depot. They were junk (came on all the time for no reason). I adjusted two different units to no end, they simply didn't work. Since that was basically all Home Depot carried, I went to Lowes, and got a Regent Lighting unit. It was better, but not by much. I want my back yard to be relatively sensitive, triggered by the dogs when we let them out, but the front yard to be insensitive, triggered only by a car or the close approach of a person. Where can I get a good quality, motion sensor flood light? What are the secrets to aiming and adjusting them so they work right?"

There are other options...

[dvogt]

First off, I have to say I agree with the original poster... I too tried to use the Zenith stuff from Home Depot when replacing lights for a friend and the stuff simply doesn't work. Pretty disappointing since there isn't much to this stuff. When I started looking into doing lights for my home I also looked at the X10 stuff but finally decided to build my own infrastructure. Not that there is anything wrong with the X10 stuff... it's affordable, easy to use, and has lots of software support. However, I'm building some custom home automation stuff anyways (such as asterisk integration and a cross platform graphical data-flow language for microcontrollers so you can embed control logic onto a cheap controller board instead of using a dedicated pc without needing to know how to write code) so I figured I'd customize the motion stuff as well. I found some GE motion sensors for about $10 that work great (and actually come with docs covering sensetivity, range, effective angles, etc... which you don't normally get in a packaged unit). I modified them a bit to add tamper detection but otherwise they work great out of the box. These feed back into a controller board which can also control the flood lights (which are just standard floods controlled by relays). And yes, I'm sure all this can be done with X10, I just prefer to build my own stuff (http://www.kondra.com/circuit/circuit.html [kondra.com]).