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I'm loving Insteon

I'm not associated with smarthome, in fact I think their prices are too high but service excellent, but I'm lovin Insteon.

I'm a diy'er who over the past 20 years or so used x10 mostly for convenience purposes. In my new home I decided to use Insteon because it was reverse compatible with my x10 stuff and security panel. Well I've got about 40 devices installed so far and have yet to see a real failure or undependable behavior. The only quirk is that if you walk up to say a multi keypad and very quickly hit several buttons in succession the keypad does not "queue up" those requests, it sends them all at once (apparently) and one of the commands may be skipped. But if you wait about a fourth of a second between each button press, all works fine. Maybe future keypads will add a "queueing mechanism" to "single file" the commands that are pressed faster by the user than the system can take them.

Other than that, the Insteon hardware is rock solid and in conjuction with the smarthome developed software is a snap to program. Even complicated multi-button cross programming is a snap. Want 5 switches to control a load and all switches to show correct status? Piece of cake. I have not had a single incident of relay chatter either, something that my old x10 devices were very bad at with flickering relays going on/off. I hope we see more devices from SH on a regular basis. This really is a nice system for the diy'er, but the software will make your life a lot easier than just getting the devices alone.

Any other Insteon users here?

Reply to
RickH
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It cannot send them "all at once" so it must queue them in some manner or else you have to pace the presses to allow previous commands to complete. Most likely there's a limited "queue" size which you exceed if you press too many buttons in too short a period.

Reply to
Dave Houston

I think they are not waiting for completion and not queuing at all, if I go only slightly slower than the time it takes my finger to get to the next button then it works ok, but I did notice that the light is already coming on for the first button within that time. If I go too fast from button to button the subsequent keypress is ignored (but the local button flashes to indicate that it ignored your keypress) all you have to do is press it again and it responds. Anyway these response times are still instantaneous compared to x10, and most of the time you are hitting only one button on the keypad.

Ultimately I want to assign buttons to scenes so only one keypress is necessary, I'll wait to see how our lifestyle uses the lights to determine the most useful scenes. Scenes are really something only the homeowner can do effectively, because an installer can never assume to know how you live in your home, or what is a useful scene.

Reply to
RickH

[snip]

Our INSTEON installation (~35 switches+dimmers and ~ 10 RF+PLC) took some time to get the kinks out but I am now more than pleased and glad I made the decision when I did.

1) the HomeSeer driver was erratic and incomplete for a long time, in large part because the underlying SDM from SmartLabs was buggy. (It's been running without a burp for a couple+ months now and the built-in link editing, performance monitoring makes the SmartLabs software superfluous), 2) Appliance modules that reportedly overheated,

3) Several of the V2 devices could be forced to show the 'dreaded' flicker problem,

4) The original RF phase connector turned out to be unable to hear RF keypads and so had to swapped out for smarter devices

5) the PLC controllers (USB and serial) wanted to be sent home for upgraded firmware

6) Some of the V1.1 ICON dimmers would infrequently but visibly blink (RMA'd replacement with free shipping both ways are on the way.)

7) and whatever else I forgot.

SmartHome was unrelentingly cheerful and efficient in facilitating the RMA's and except for the RF coupler upgrade, paying postage both ways.

Fussing with these issues was penalty for being a relatively earlier adopter. The upside was paying

Reply to
Marc_F_Hult

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