apostolakisl

I have a bunch of Venstar thermostats with Insteon attachment at my church. I have noticed an issue where the HVAC unit will be in one state (ie cooling) and it will say it is cooling when you look at the device in the admin console. But when you click on the folder and see the page that lists everything in the folder, on that page it will say the unit is off. In addition, programs that should be running when the device is cooling will not be running. If I shut the unit down, then turn it back on, it will then be correct. This is sporadic and happens across the board on different units seemingly randomly. Below are the pages I am referring to. Now at this time, the pages are in agreement, but a few minutes ago they weren't. I had to shut the unit down for a minute and turn it back on, now they agree. Prior to that, the summary page showed "off" as the cool control current state for unit "upstairs south". But the device page showed "cooling" in the heating/cooling box. And indeed, the unit was cooling. Are there different nodes for these things even though they seem to be the same node? I have noticed that sometimes the "control on" command is a missed com to the PLM, and because of that, I have ISY set to run queries of the units every 15 minutes which corrects the device specific page to say "cooling" or "idle", but it does not correct the summary page and it does not cause programs that look for the state of the unit to run. Here is my summary page: Here is my device page

Nodelink works a little different. It is installed into ISY as a single node, however, you can have lots of sub nodes under that single ISY node and they all show up in ISY tree as if they were separate nodes (but under the "node servers" tab, it is just one node). In my case, ISYlink (for whatever reason the name on ISY node server tabs is "ISY Link" instead of "nodelink") it is node number 1. I currently have 3 nodes running on nodelink, 2 of which produce heartbeats (CAI webcontrol and DSC alarm). There is no setting to disable the heartbeats as far as I can find. I also have nodelink running on a 994i at my church. I have never had any issues with it. That ISY is on 5.0.16c firmware and has gone without a reboot now for almost a year and runs perfectly. I have had nodelink running for many years (probably going on 10) and I am not aware of any updates to nodelink in a very long time. Nodelink predates the existence of polyglot by quite a long time. This problem on the other hand is quite recent, just in the past few months, which makes me curious how something that didn't change would now change its behavior. The problem is also hard to predict. It has not happened now in almost a month. Prior to that, it went a couple weeks. Right after the most recent event, a new version of the polisy firmware came out and I installed it. So I don't know if that has anything to do with everything working now for a month. I do not know much about sockets. I assume there is some back and forth acknowledgement? I suppose an outsider requests a socket, and the ISY grants it. But is there an acknowledgement? Does the outsider get confirmation of an open socket and then continue to use the same socket? Does the outsider just send whatever packet it is sending and then close the socket until the next time it has data to send?

Sorry, not sure what you mean. If nodelink is connected it alternates the value of "heartbeat" value free 1 to -1 every 30 seconds. If heartbeat value doesn't change that means the node is either not working or not connected.

@Geddy Win10pro Interestingly, for the last few months, I wasn't able to use IoX either. I have to use the java console you access from ISY itself. And then after this update, java just wouldn't open at all. And just now, windows is showing another update. UHGGGG!

I wanted to share this in the IoX launcher, but it is locked. I was getting this error after doing a windows update, java update. I did the usual clearing of the temporary files/applets. Still go the error. Tried using windows control panel to delete Java and resinstalled from the Java website, same story. Unchecked and checked keep temporary files box and still. Finally, I fixed it by using the Java website's uninstaller and the offline installer. https://www.java.com/download/help/troubleshoot_java.html Perhaps this may save someone some time in the future.

Using Open Weather to do the same thing and mine works fine. Both Subject and Body. This is PG2. Guess they started using crazy strings for the address of the node instead of words like "weather".

Blower door test on an older home will probably be abysmal! But likely will point you to the worst culprits as well as some low hanging fruit corrections. You can use a thermal flir camera if you do it on a cold day and see where some of your worst leaks are. Losses through the attic tend to be some of the biggest especially during heating season when air wants to rise. I did not do a blower test on my house 15 years ago when I built it, but I did take advantage of the crazy cold we had 2 winters ago and took my flir camera to the attic and discovered a pretty large hole in the spray foam. They totally missed between two joists where it meets the ceiling in one spot. Spray foaming the roof deck is also very helpful even if your house doesn't leak. I took a flir reading on my roof on a 100 degree day with the sun beating down on my roof both of the roof from the outside, and then from the inside. The reading on the outside surface of the roof was 145, the reading on the same spot on the inside was 88 and my attic air was 80. I do not have vents in my attic, but I also do not have insulation between the house and the attic, so some seeps through . . . about just the right amount really in my opinion. Climate controlled enough to make it useful storage space and to keep electronics safely operating. I didn't measure the air at the peak of the gables, likely hotter up there, but I don't store things up there. In Summary, better insulation will make your house more comfortable, save you money in HVAC electrical use, and also mean you can downsize your HVAC and save money there too. Depending on how bad things are to start with, it very well may be that it doesn't hardly cost any more to do insulation plus smaller hvac system.

I haven't read all of these posts but I have maintained some 25 year old systems, keeping them tuned up great and have installed multiple new systems. There are lots of options depending on your needs and how much money you want to spend. The cost of your electricity is important when you look at it from an roi point of view. Generally, the highest end equipment does not make financial sense. Usually the upper mid grade stuff is best at that. 1) Builder grade heat pump. Cheapest, lowest allowable SEER. Single stage so you have to size it just right and it won't have flexibility for running nicely at the extremes. Parts will probably be generic and cheaper to repair. For example, the blower motor will like be a single speed device vs a variable speed. Cost for variable speed will be maybe $1000 to replace vs $200. 2)Upgraded heat pump systems. I feel like a 2 stage unit is best for the money. With 2 stage you can put in a larger system to handle worst case scenarios (you have 20 people in your house on a 100 degree day), but yet still run efficiently without cycling on normal days. Most of these now can run efficiently down to single digit temps on heat mode. You will now have variable speed fans and will have to endure the high cost of replacing these ECM motors should you have failure. ECM (electronically commutated motor) circuit board may fail and then the whole motor needs to be pitched. My outdoor unit fan motor on one unit failed and I think it was like $1200 (that was with me replacing it). Really doubt it saved me $1000 in electricity before burning out. It is a Carrier Infinity and was about 10 years old. 3) Super upgraded heat pump. Now you have a continuously variable compressor and fans. These are designed to run constantly just hard enough to maintain temp. They will tend to be very comfortable because there are no swings in temp. Of course your insulation and windows will play a huge role in this. Good insulation and windows can make most systems very comfortable. These are pricey and very proprietary. Hard and expensive to service. They also tend to have the flat vertical outdoor condensing unit which tend to be very quiet and smaller. 4) Geothermal. Can be great. It really is a cost thing. If you have a lake in your backyard or shallow well or plenty of yard that you can easily trench, then it may be cost effective. The condensing unit is typically inside and they are very quiet. They can also make hot water. Usually need special people to service them. Theoretically with the condensing unit inside in a nice climate controlled space you would say it should last longer . . . theoretically. 5) Mini-split style. There are versions of these where you have as few as a single outdoor condensing unit that feeds freon directly to multiple air handlers throughout your home that hang on the wall or are built into the ceiling. Tend to be very efficient and you can have great control of each room. These can be nice when retro-fitting an old home that never had an HVAC system since you only need to plumb the small copper lines and not big air vents. Also used in new construction on high end stuff. Rarely a retrofit to a house that already has forced air. Other thoughts. 1) Many of the fancy units will have proprietary thermostats and, being a HA forum and all, you may find issue with since they may not seamlessly integrate. 2) FIX YOUR INSULATION!!! I highly recommend this. Spray foam insulation on the bottom of your roof deck which will seal in your attic. You will dramatically cut air losses through all the holes in your ceiling to attic. If your air handler and ducts are in the attic, you will no longer be losing air to the "outside". Also, your losses across the walls of your ducts won't matter any more. Consider that in the summer your attic might be 140 or 150 degrees and inside your ducts you have 45 degree air. You are trying to hold a 100 degree delta across that thinly insulated duct wall. Similar backwards in winter. Plus now your attic is a reasonable place to be. I keep my server in my attic and have lots of storage. Temp is only about 10 degrees different from inside the house. Also helps to turn away rodents when they don't "smell" the attic from outside. One of my rental properties had issues with the hvac not maintaining temp on hot days. The hvac system was old but working correctly. I could have spent a bunch of money just powering through with a bigger unit, but instead insulated the attic roof deck. That was 8 years ago, still using the same old hvac that is now 30 years old. Cost half of what a new hvac would have cost.

Background: Polisy 5.6.2 (now .3); Nodelink 0.10.6 with 3 nodes DSC, CAI Webcontrol, and Date Data. Nodelink runs on 24/7 PC win10 that also runs blue iris and nothing else. Nodelink has been running for perhaps a decade on that PC. Nodelink predates Polisy by many years and was formerly connected to a 994i. It never had issues on 994i, or for the first couple years or so on Polisy. (I bought one of the very first Polisy units). Problem. In the past couple months I have had several incidents where ISY is having issues. First symptom is ISY stops getting updates from nodelink and a minute or so later I'll get an email from ISY that it has missed heartbeats from nodelink. After a while UD Mobile will lose its connection. I will not be able to connect from the admin console, it gets stuck on "starting subscription" and connections to PG2 and PG3 stop working as well. Michel logged in and says nodelink is leaving hundreds of abandoned open sockets that are blocking ISY from talking to other stuff. SSH does continue to work and Michel was looking at Polisy via SSH during the issue. ISY otherwise seems to keep running programs and doing things that it normally does via Insteon. ISY also continues to send emails every half hour as directed telling me that it is missing heartbeats even after all the other stuff goes down. I have continued to do updates to Polisy and this all seemed to start after an update not long ago from one version of 5. something to 5. something else (I forget exactly). The most recent incident ISY was on 5.6.2 but prior to that it happened on a previous 5 version. Of course there are PG updates and OS updates for Polisy that go along, but I don't know those version numbers. Nodelink has not changed. I have had that computer doing periodic windows updates but otherwise nothing much happens there for years. I don't really know much about sockets. My feeling here based on the timing of things, as gradually more and more things that use IP to communicate with ISY go down, is that for some reason nodelink starts opening more and more sockets until ISY can no longer talk via IP to other stuff. I don't know why nodelink would do this. Does nodelink open a socket and then get no response so it opens another? Or is nodelink just going nuts and opening sockets for no reason? And why does it just start doing this. . . .most recently at 11:06 yesterday with the other stuff connected to ISY totally crashing about a half hour later. Thanks!

The name "insteon" is a product of how fast the com is (like instant?). And in fact, it does pretty much live up to the name. A program can be quick, but it will sometimes take a second or more. You can easily see how fast Insteon works when you have a scene of switches and you push one of the paddles in the scene that is not the load switch, and yet, from a human perspective, it seems to be instant, as though you were pushing the load switch. This is certainly something that Insteon has over other technologies like Zwave. Anyway, if you are OK with the on time to be the same during the day or night and just want the brightness to be different, I would do it the way I just showed. Some have argued that re-writing the memory on the switches twice a day can "wear it out", but that does not appear to be an actual concern. The memory chips on Insteon devices do not seem to "wear out", the other stuff will be their demise (mostly caps).

In that case, this is totally something that you would do with direct links and just re-write the scene attributes with a program but let the motion sensor run all the on/off commands directly. I have a MS in my pantry that controls two devices. I wrote this program to show how I would make the MS turn the lights on to 50% while the sun is down and 100% while it is up. The actually turning on/off of the scene is directly controlled by the MS. New Program - [ID 001B][Parent 0093][Not Enabled] If From Sunrise To Sunset (same day) Then In 'Kitchen / Pantry Motion' Set 'Kitchen / Pantry - Light L' To 100% in 0.5 seconds, 1 retry In 'Kitchen / Pantry Motion' Set 'Kitchen / Pantry - Undercabinet L' To 100% in 0.5 seconds, 1 retry Else In 'Kitchen / Pantry Motion' Set 'Kitchen / Pantry - Light L' To 50% in 0.5 seconds, 1 retry In 'Kitchen / Pantry Motion' Set 'Kitchen / Pantry - Undercabinet L' To 50% in 0.5 seconds, 1 retry

It just seems to me that giving up the 15 second difference between night and daytime is trivial and would allow you to directly link the devices. Direct link will work faster, use less resources, and be more obvious to edit in the future when you forgot about this program because it is buried in with a hundred other programs. If you wanted to do something different night vs day, you could write a program that changes the on level and/or ramp rate at day vs night.

I wouldn't use programs to do any of this. Just make a scene with the motions sensors as controllers and set the motion sensor to 20 or 30 or 40 seconds timeout, or whatever you want (sorry, can't do 35). Not sure why you need to have the daytime timeout to be 15 seconds different from the nighttime one. Seems like a needless complication. But if indeed you do, you can have a program re-write the scene at sunset/sunrise. But if you want to keep the programs, probably you need to set the motion sensor to "report on only" commands.

I would expect "control" to work fine as the program is written. But the MS I have heard have some funny things. I have two of them but have them directly linked to the lights and use the time out from the MS. Basically, all default settings and used ISY to just link to the light switch, no programs. Work great for a pantry and laundry room where you are carrying things in and out and don't have free hands. And as long as you move around at least a little bit, the light stays on. But back to the OP, if he follows the status of the program in the admin console to completion, he will at least know where things are going wrong.

@photogeek54 I tried my key as well on Tuesday when you posted this and it didn't work. Then I tried it today, and it did work. I was able to use the 3.0 version very shortly after creating the key, but the 2.5 just started working now, after like 10 days or maybe more.

Walk into the room and trigger the MS and see the lights turn on. Then leave the room and watch the program. It should be solid green. After 30 minutes it should turn to half green. If it turns to half red instead at some point, then you have your answer. The program is re-triggering "false" before 30 minutes is up. This kills the program as it is running and restarts it which runs the else clause (which is blank). The solution is to stop the re-triggering and this would involve changing the settings on the MS. If the program ends up completing and the icon turns half green, but the lights don't turn off, then you have a com issue. The reason for this would be a "noisy" light. In other words, the light is blocking the insteon signal because it is creating interference. The solution is to use a different light bulb or transformer if it is low voltage or put a filter on it. This problem used to be very common before dual band Insteon devices but can still happen. You can also test for this by turning the light on and off from the admin console. If it turns off fine, from the admin console, then you don't have a noisy light.

The older version allows for free forecast more than 5 days. I forget the max, but I set mine to one week.

I have PG2 on the ISY at my church and added openweather to it. I got a key from openweather and it didn't work (authentication error). I noticed that in the example openweather gives, everything is identical to the url PG2 openweather uses, except it shows 3.0 in the url where PG2 shows 2.5. So I cut and paste the url from the log in GP2 and loaded into a web browser. I got an error. I then changed the 2.5 in the url to 3.0 and it worked. I then used a key I have that is several years old from openweather and plugged it in using 2.5 and it worked. It appears that they have grandfathered in keys to keep working on 2.5. It also means unless you have an old key, PG2 won't work with openweather. Anyway, if the OP is using PG2 and a new key, it won't work. Perhaps, if he is using an old key and PG3 (which I assumes uses 3.0 in the url) it won't work. Or maybe it will, I haven't tried it that way.

Open Weather has a 2.5 and 3.0 version. I know a 3.0 key does not work in 2.5. Not sure about the opposite. PG2 using 2.5, not sure what PG3 version uses.

@Javi That sounds great. If you could have multiple variables inserted one after the next like in ISY under "email/notifications"/"customizations" that would make the favorites tile pretty much tell you everything you might want to know without opening the tile. In weather for example, day of week/high/low/chance of rain. Example I currently have in ISY Outside ${sys.node.n009_weather.CLITEMP} Inside ${elk.keypad.1.temp}

@DennisC You put the day of the forecast as the second line, the variable, I would like the forecast high to be there. So where yours says "Forecast DH Tuesday" I would like it to say "Tuesday Forecast 98" In this case, both "tuesday" and "98" would be variables filled in from the current state of the node. In other words, both line 1 and 2 be able to have variables subbed in.

That doesn't do what I want. When you do that, the default display name is then "forecast x" (where x is 0, 1, 2, 3 etc). You can replace that with a custom name (for 0 I replaced it with "today forecast"), but the custom name is static. I want to make the custom name be assigned one of the node values (in this case the day of the week it is currently reporting). For today and tomorrow, a static name is fine, but as you get further out that gets a little silly. "3 day from now forecast" . . . In short, I would like variable substitution available in the custom name, much like you can do in ISY for custom messages. And yes, I have made it change the color of the icon for different temp ranges. Over 100 goes red, less than 40 goes blue, all others are green.

I was wondering if we could add the ability to display 2 different sub nodes on the icon for a node. Either by replacing the node name or just having another option. Example here is displaying Weatherbyit forecast. I'd like to see the day and forecasted temp without opening the node. Currently I see "forecast 0" as the name of the node and the forecast temp below it. I'd like to see the day of the week "forecast 0" (or 1 or 2 etc) refers to as well as the temp. Mostly this is an issue for higher numbers since forecast 0 is the same as today and 1 is tomorrow. But higher numbers start to require doing math and I was told there would be no math.

I just dug deep into the app and can't find anywhere to set your monthly bill start date. It shows monthly usage only as calendar month, not your billing cycle month. I also checked to see if the app had an update and it doesn't. So, if you can't tell it your monthly billing cycle start date, there would be no way for it to report your usage during that period. There is a last 30 day reading which would tell you your billing cycle usage if you checked that value on the last day of your billing cycle. But typically people are looking for usage billing cycle to date. People who have tiered pricing would want to know when they are approaching the next tier. So, you could write some programs in ISY that add up your daily usage and save it as a variable which gets reset on your billing start date.

I asked flume to do the same thing. I'm sure lots of people have. I guess it is either very hard to do or they don't really care. Emporia energy monitor does let you set the bill date.