apostolakisl

I have seen colored accents lights that look good, but that is because it isn't the functional light. It is meant to light up a wall or patch of ceiling, as if it were artwork. When the light you use to actually see what you are doing is mono-chromatic, it is poor.

Was that because you could make that green growth you have disappear? Oh, I kill myself.

So far, no Klingon attacks so that feature hasn't paid off. Perhaps outdoor lights that you can do holiday tricks with, but I just don't see the indoor lights being anything more than a party trick. When my fire alarm goes off, all the lights turn on full brightness, no tricky red lights or anything to make a stressful situation more stressful. We already have a loud audible signal letting you know to get out. Wandering around the house at night with red lights isn't the greatest idea. CRI of a mono-chromatic color is horrifically bad and depending on which color light and what color your floor/object on the floor is, it could become almost invisible. The safest color light is a shade of white with a high CRI. You will see much better at a dim high CRI than a bright bad CRI. A simple example would be a green matchbox car on green carpet with a red light. It would all look black. If you like it and use it and it serves you well, then I can't argue . . .it is, at least in part, an aesthetic. I just know that in my house, if I installed such lights, I would be like, "look honey, the lights change color by pushing this button, cool eh". And my wife would be like "oh, that's nice", and then that would be the last time the lights weren't white.

why do people want their living room lights green, or red? Sounds like 1974 stoner party. Now that is old man.

For the life of me, why would you buy a wifi light bulb? Talk about way expensive and way inconvenient. With a switch, you still control the switch all regular like, with bulbs, the switch doesn't work normal at all. Furthermore, you may need 4 or 6 or 10 or who knows how many fancy *** bulbs where one fancy *** switch could do the same . . . and give you the full gamut of possible bulbs (or just keep your current bulbs). And then when the stupid bulb burns out, now you have to redo your setup and any automation you had assigned to that old bulb(s). Maybe they have a "replace with" command . . . I don't know, but I don't think so. Assuming this new software is actually nice, the average person would need nothing more than Insteon products. Now people like you and me who want to have their lawnmower integrated, well we will have more "dongles" to deal with. But even at that, with the ISY is going, the new Polisy is likely to streamline that whole thing into a seamless package. Now you can build your network starting off all super-easy like with the hub and if you want to get more fancy, you switch over to polisy, but don't have to do much in the conversion.

Hopefully! If Insteon gets to be a big player then prices might come down more and we might get a lot more product choices. I just don't get the aversion to a hub, if the software is good, the hub is invisible. It is just an extension of the device itself hidden in some closet never needing to be seen or touched. The software would make the two seem as one. Hopefully people who do cloud based realize that if the company goes bankrupt then you are hosed. Or if your internet or wifi go down, your house stops working. That is the great thing about Insteon, it works all by itself, cloud is totally optional. I certainly hope it stays that way with the new hub software.

This is nice to see. If it actually works as well as they claim it works, then it should make things as simple as anything that is "hubless". I really don't see what the heck difference it makes if your phone talks to a hub that talks to a device, or if your phone works directly with the device. I guess you have to buy a hub. It depends on costs as well. If a hub costs $80 but the switches are $10 cheaper than the competition, then an 8 switch system is break even. The other thing about a hub is that it lets your run coordinated schedules. You obviously can't run any schedules on your phone, it has to be on a permanently connected device. Either some sort of "mesh" computing where all your individual devices synchronize their internally programmed schedules, or you have a hub that keeps the schedule and all your "dumb" devices just sit there and do what they are told when they are told. The latter seems less apt to have trouble. The UI is key, that is for sure. A beautiful, slick, easy to customize, easy to understand UI (that actually works) is all that stands between Insteon as a "HA geek" product vs as a "everybody" product. The actually capabilities of the Insteon protocol lack nothing as far as I can tell, except for the occasional noise issue (which at least in my home was cured by dual band).

Yes, clearly they have been paring down to just the stuff that sells in volume. No doubt, they lost money on some of those odd-ball things like dimming ballasts and synchrolincs. Sad thing is, that those are the things that made you want to use Insteon for everything. I understand it is a tough spot to be in. If they would open up their source code or at least let other companies buy their chips, I think Insteon would end up way better off.

The point here goes back to "is insteon disappearing". An argument you are making is that Insteon needs a hub and that is just too complicated. In the context of how complicated it is too physically replace a switch . . .linking is far and away the easy part. ISY is fairly complex, but you may not need or want that. The Insteon hub is fairly simple and could be very simple if they just fixed the firmware a bit. A hub can be just as simple as a direct to wifi if the firmware is written that way. Certainly for a "lamplinc" type device a novice would be inclined to just buy it, plug it in and be done. But swapping out a switch . . .especially one in say a 3 gang box and being a 3 or 4 way switch suddenly becomes 30 minutes for electrician and probably more than an hour for the standard decently skilled home owner and probably a 1/2 days work for the novice home owner by the time they watch 10 youtube videos and get all scared and stuff and do it wrong twice. So for a wall switch . . . plug and play is never an option. If your going to swap a switch, you are invested and aren't going to care about pushing one extra button. And then there is still the router issues. Most home grade routers don't do well with lots of clients. Many brands limit you to 50 clients unless you manually override it, and there is a reason for that and it isn't bandwidth (I forget the real reason but this was all explained in very complex terms by a network pro on Cocoon a couple years ago). In short, if you have a plug and play device (ie lamplinc) and you only plan on having a few of them, then direct to wifi is great and that is why they sell them at wall mart. Those companies need 50 to 100 customers however to sell the same volume that a true HA company sells to 1 customer like your or me.

A system like that would only be valuable to someone who wanted a few lights automated er, I mean remote controlled. That is great and there are lots or people who want just that. But you hardly take over the home automation market when you aren't selling home automation. So I don't argue that there is a place for that. I just argue that it is a different product all together. Just like put put courses do a fine business, they aren't selling golf and real golf doesn't worry that it is losing market share to put put.

What is the difference if your ISY finds the device or your Google home finds it? You still have to manually acknowledge the device and somewhere in there have physical contact with the device (push a button, scan it or something to prove it is your device). Otherwise, just like the earlier post with the thermostat, your neighbor might accidentally (or on purpose) take control of your devices. The ISY, for example, is just a slightly better user interface away from being as convenient as any method. An automated light switch is never going to be plug and play. No matter what, you need to remove the old one and wire in the new one. If you can do that, you can certainly push a button on it . . . and that will be the easiest part of the whole thing. I guess you could have the lamplinc type device for plug and play, but how many table lamps do people want to automate (or I should say remote control since those plug and play setups pretty much aren't automating anything). Again, you can't start having 200 devices on your wifi.

@Mustang65 @larryllix I disagree. Most home routers can not handle that many devices. With every switch in your house on the system, you could easily be way up over 100 devices including all the other stuff you might have. I have over 50 things on my wifi as it is. It makes more sense to have a hub. The process of adding a device to your hub needs to be simple. Really there is nothing different to the end use between registering a device to their hub vs registering it to their router. Either way, you need to run some app that takes you through the linking process. ISY and Insteon is pretty easy . . .right? I mean you just push a button on your ISY console and push a button on the device. The issue with ISY is just that the console is not the greatest. Hopefully we will get a new one soon.

He seems to think Insteon switches cost $70 when commenting about the firmware not being upgradeable. Maybe he is talking about a KPL? Can a Z-wave light switch be upgraded? What brands of remote control light switches do offer firmware upgrades? I really don't know. I do know that the 2 z-wave switches I own have no upgrade capacity. But again, who TF is going to park outside my house and try to hack my light switches? Seriously, how desperate for a purpose in life would you have to be? I guess some people use Insteon to control the GDO, so I suppose you could break into a house that way. But it would be a whole lot easier to just walk up to the garage door with a crow bar and pop it open (they pretty much all can be popped like that). That is why I have an alarm system.

who is DEF CON?

Not worried. If SH screws this up, then the patents will all be sold to settle the bankruptcy and someone else will start producing them. And I have to say, security? I mean if someone is so hard up for something to do with their time that they drive up to radio range of my house and turn my lights on and off . . . I mean come on.

Just to be clear, SSH is a protocol, not a program. Lots of terminal emulator programs (the program on the remote computer that pretends to be a terminal on the host device, polisy in this case) have the SSH (secure shell) protocol built-in. I use Putty. It is via the SSH protocol that the terminal emulator program communicates the user interface.

I certainly have no problem using SSH and executing an ifconfig command from the terminal window. But I also share @asbrilthoughts regarding Ethernet. My intention is to simply plug it in. If indeed I did that, would the device simply use dhcp?

Is polisy going to run the admin console on itself instead of syncing to a java console on your computer? It sure would be nice. The java thing needs to be reset every time your computer goes to sleep and it takes like 20 seconds or more to load it up.

I'm pretty sure there is no load minimum on an Insteon dimmer switch. Insteon dimmers use a triac dimmer and I don't think triacs have a minimum load. It isn't like a ballast, it is just passing through the line voltage (clipped when dimmed).

found an equation that figures wire melting current/time relationship. It appears that the relationship between time and melting is linear. So, twice the amps, half the time sort of thing. I can't vouch for the below, but it looks good at a glance, except I don't follow the "Area" number. I believe it is intended for sizing the wire in a fuse. Example: 16 gauge copper wire: Tmelt = 1083, Area = 2581 circ mil, Time = 5 sec, Tamb = 25 E= Area in CM (of the wire)B = Tmelt (of the wire)- Tamb in deg. CD = 234-Tambient in deg. CT= time in seconds.So, E = 2581, B= 1058, D=209, T=5ThenIfuse = E* SQRT {<LOG[(B/D)+1]>/(T*33)}Ifuse = 2581* SQRT {<LOG[(1058/210)+1]>/165}Ifuse = 2581* SQRT {<LOG(6.04)>/165}Ifuse = 2581* SQRT {0.781/165}Ifuse = 2581* SQRT {.00473}Ifuse = 2581* 0.0688Ifuse = 178A

Like I said earlier, I have 3 of the leviton branch panel devices. With this thread, I found myself at leviton's website where they discussed the "best" protection as also including a main panel protector in addition to subpanel units (plus point of use devices). I think I may go ahead and do that. It appears I need two of them since my main power feed from the meter splits to two panels, a 150 and a 200 amp. The main panel leviton model is considerably less expensive than the sub-panel model. I presume this is because it works by shunting to ground as opposed to whatever more complicated way it deals with surges at the sub-panel.

I won't argue with this. I guess what it comes down to is the actual current and the actual time. But, no doubt, you can flash vaporize a metal really stinking fast with enough juice. Ever hammered a nail through a wire? The nail vaporizes faster than the circuit breaker can pop. I once had a failed AC compressor vaporize a 12 gauge wire (3 phase unit). Though I have no idea how long it took. Fortunately it didn't set the building on fire because the wire in question was in an outdoor conduit about 20 feet from the unit. We had a discussion after finding the fried wire as to what the odds were that there would be more damage elsewhere and if we should run an entire new wire from the panel. In the end, we decided not to run a new wire but rather just the section from the j-box at the building entrance to the unit. 3 years later, all is oK. It may also be that voltage spikes aren't accompanied by current capacity. So once you give a path to ground, the voltage may drop precipitously when there isn't any available current to keep the voltage up. A static electricity discharge.

First off, I say, when all else fails, read the directions. So, I followed them as per my earlier posting. My house is 12 years old and was wired by qualified electricians, so I will take the leap of faith that it will work as spec'd. Second, there is no way in the world that 12g wire and a 20amp breaker (which is what the instructions call for on the surge protector I installed) are going to shunt thousands of amps anywhere. Those items would simply explode in a cloud of vaporized copper and plastic. My take, electric destruction occurs because of current, after all, electricity is current, otherwise it is just electrons. Electrons move in the presence of potential differences between point a and point b when a conductor sits between. Voltage is all about your reference point. Perhaps at its most fundamental level, voltage could be measured relative to having equal number of protons and electrons, but who can measure that? And that serves no point anyway, since we are looking to define electricity and electricity is all about the potential difference and its affect on current. Anyway, make point a and point b equal, there will be no flow, there will be no harm. My suspicion, is that protection is achieved by allowing neutrals and grounds to rise in potential to meet the rise in potential on the line. All 3 could rise to a million volts and you wouldn't even know it provided the rise on all 3 happened in unison and then dropped off in unison. So in short, I believe this is about charging everything equally, to prevent current, not re-directing current. Looking at it a different way. The wire that is theoretically bringing in the surge is very fat, 2-0 I think on my sub-panels. That wire can handle vastly more amps as compared to the 12g wire that the surge protector uses. So the surge suppressor can not possibly protecting by outflowing the amps that might come in my service wire. Tell me how it could be otherwise?

My solution is . . . .no telco.

Oh, lets see. I suppose you could look at the original post you so authoritatively quoted me on where I respond to another use saying that "I have 3 of those" referring to the model he lists. But for the benefit of those out there who actually need help, it is the leviton 51120--1. The name for this device is "branch panel mounted surge protection device". Yes, that is the title of the instruction sheet, first three words are "Branch panel mounted".