I am new to this forum so there may be some answers out there already, although I didn't find them with a search. I have been playing with the ISY, ELK, and Insteon products for a couple of years. What I want to do is bring my pool and hot tub controls into the system and looking for the best solution. I have separate pool and hot tub systems along with solar for both. I am currently using an old Intellitouch system which was good 15 years ago, but not so useful today. It has lots of problems with its design which I wont go into. I know I can control valves using the Intermatic PE24 and pumps with Insteon high current 240V switches which have worked well for me so far. The real problem I am facing is being able to measure temperature accurately and quickly and feed it into ISY to make decisions to turn on gas heater, or open solar valves, etc. I'd like to connect 6 or so thermometers or thermostats in various places and use them to make decisions. If the Insteon thermostat could be set to say 105F I could simply drop it in and use it like I would my home thermostat to control hot tub, only it is limited on the high end to 90 something. It will read higher, but I can't use it to set the temp and and feedback directly to hot tub heater. Currently I am using it to read the temperature and the feed the data back to ISY to make the decision to turn the heater on or off. There are a couple of problems with this. First it is not as nice to set the temp, but second and most importantly the feedback loop is slow. For example if I want the heater to be set to 103, and say turn it off at 103, it tends to overshoot to 104 or 105 and then not turn back on until 100 or 101, causing a 3 to 5 degrees of variation. The problem is it takes too long to get the signal to ISY that the temperature has changed. Is there anyway to get it to send temp to ISY more quickly? I am not sure what the cycle time is, but would expect it to happen if the temp changed by a small amount.
What are your suggestions? I am ok with starting over with something totally different if needed. What i want to be able to do is read back temp every 10 or 15 seconds whenever the hot tub pump is running and is close to set temp and use ISY to make decisions about when to start the heater or turn it off.