apostolakisl

I have to wonder why you would remove copper lines? Pex isn't better than copper, it is just cheaper, both for the materials and for the installation, so it pretty much has taken over new construction. But if your copper is already paid for and installed, I don't know why you would switch it out. Are you tearing out walls and and have to move the plumbing? I'm sure you are annoyed by your kids wasting hot water, but I'm also thinking that putting a shut off valve to each bathroom is going to cost way more than any savings on your hot water bill. The cheapest valves I have seen are the ones SH sells for $100/ea and you still need a flow monitor and an interface to get that signal to ISY. . . .probably another $100. So $200 per shower times however many showers. I only spend $500 on propane for my entire family of 5 every 2 or 3 years (usually buy about 300 gallons at about $1.75/gal). Any valve for residential use will be rated for hot water use. The flow switch . .. who knows, each one will have its own deal.

If you use a tankless water heater you can put a synchrolinc on the water heater power supply. All the tankless models I have seen have a fan running while the burner is on which a syncrholinc would be able to monitor.

Sounds to me like your starting from scratch, mostly. You can export your entire set of programs and import them back. But as far as scenes, you can't do that. When you import the programs, I think it will drop the same devices back into each program, but I'm not 100% on that. I've never exported and then imported back into my own system. When I import someone else's programs, I have to go through and specify all the devices, but of course you would expect that. If you take some screen shots of your scenes and folder architecture, it probably won't take that long to rebuild, especially if you have the pro-isy model where you can delay the write. And if your going to the trouble, you should factory reset all your devices and truly have a clean start. THEN MAKE A BACKUP AND SAVE IT IN 2 PLACES!!!! put it on google drive or something.

This is for the drier. The washer is easy, I just plugged it into a synchrolinc and tweaked the settings until it gave the proper on/off status.

That flapper is from Lowe's and if memory serves me, listed for both gas and electric. But gas is going to be 120v and you can just use a synchrolinc.

There is this. http://www.bonanza.com/listings/G3-4-Male-Threaded-1-30L-min-Magnetic-Type-Water-Flow-Switch-Flowmeter-DC-250V/255554134?goog_pla=1&gpid=18283950120&keyword=&goog_pla=1&pos=1o2&ad_type=pla&gclid=CjwKEAjwydK_BRDK34GenvLB61YSJACZ8da3fG9YS46Nr4D0Yg0LNFoqufg7byqa1idm9mMnPMe5ExoCQuPw_wcB Brass made in China, probably not code in US. I saw similar ones on amazon and there were complaints about it not be NPT and about water flow restriction. You would need an IO linc to make this thing communicate. If it were me, I would go with a pulse counter and a CAI board. That combo would be cheaper and you would get the added info of flow rate, even if it didn't really matter. It would be a very simple program to write on CAI to post to a variable the current flow rate. Every 5 seconds or so it could post a REST value to a variable showing the flow rate, in the event that the flow rate changed. You wouldn't have it keep posting "0" every 5 seconds, only if it changed. That is what I speaking of a ways back. If I were going to get this, I would install it on the main house feed and get the benefit of a whole house water protection.

On = pulses happening off = no pulses You still need to count pulses or at least measure the length of time since the most recent pulse to know flow vs no flow

Just thought I would update on this. I have had this working for about 6 months now and it is proving to be a success.

This will help with pulse counting using CAI. http://cocoontech.com/forums/topic/22252-how-to-count-pulse-from-water-flow-or-energy-meter/

To the best of my knowledge, no insteon device is capable of pulse counting. You would also need to use something like a raspberry pi or cai webcontrol board with code written on it that monitors the pulse count, makes sense of it, then posts to ISY something that you can base an ISY program on.

There are whole house water leak detection/shut off systems that both monitor flow and shut off the water. They have a cpu that runs algorithms for what normal water usage patterns are and if they detect a pattern that looks like a leak or broken line, they shut the water off. Unlike using a water detector, these algorithms do not shut the water off right away. However, unlike if you use leak sensors, this will shut the water off if your leak is somewhere you don't have a sensor. My bet is that if you had left your hose running for an hour, it would have shut the water off. Obviously, it can't shut the water off too fast, because you might have actually wanted the water running for say 20 or 30 minutes.

Your PLM probably needed new capacitors which would have saved you doing a restore. At any rate, if you don't care to replace the capacitors yourself, I'm sure someone on here would pay you to ship your old one to them for them to do the repair and have a spare.

That sounds about right for my first one. My second one died and the led was off. Both fixed with cap replacement. I probably have a year of use now on the one replacement, the other I did a 24 hour burn-in and put away as a backup.

I think one of the two I have fixed still had the led on, or at least partially lit. I still think you have a 99% chance that the caps are bad.

Replace the capacitors, 99% chance it comes back to life.

In short. There is only way connecting that black wire to neutral could work. It must be the neutral leaving the load (the light). Anything else would have popped the circuit breaker. The problem could likely be fixed quite easily by opening the box at the light and splicing the correct wires together.

check the box where the actual light is. It sounds like you are running power backwards somewhere, in on white and out on black.

2 wire insteon only works with an incandescent and "leaks" a little power through the load wire to the light bulb to power the switch itself. It is like setting the dimmer on .01% or something. The filament will be ever so slightly warmed up, but it won't light.

If white wasn't neutral, it should have been taped. But again, it doesn't matter, it should be used as a neutral now for you Insteon setup.

It doesn't matter what it used to be. The white needs to be neutral now, you must have a neutral for Insteon. At every box bundle any and all whites together. You don't have a 3 way switch anymore, you don't need to use white for anything else. If white was not neutral before, it was simply a wire between the boxes, it is not a wire going back to the house service panel. Once you bundle the whites (and only whites) together at every box it will be neutral everywhere.

In a standard 3-way, red is alternately a hot wire. The only difference between what I wrote and using black only as the hot is that you are using the black traveler wire to carry hot to box 2 instead of the red. Since black is both the color of one of the travelers and the wire to the load, you have to figure out which is which should you choose to use it as the hot. This is not difficult, but it is an added step which isn't necessary. If you have a tone generator is is super easy. If you have an ohm meter you can do it by hooking up one of the blacks to ground and going to the other box and seeing if the black at the other box is shorted to ground (of course you turn the power off to do this).

If you follow the procedure I outlined it will work. You only need to know which is your hot. Everything else defaults into place based solely on color. It doesn't matter what 3-way configuration it was to start with. White's will be neutral at all boxes doing it this way.

Well it should always happen, it is code, and a pretty simple and reasonable and safety conscious one at that. But either way, you would never need to splice a white to a red. And when switching to Insteon, your white doesn't need to be re-purposed as a hot, it can be used as neutral. And I'm pretty sure you can't wire it that way in new construction since like a really long time. Perhaps as an add on 3-way after the fact it is still OK. But new construction requires a neutral at every box for probably well over a decade, maybe 20 years?

The white wires are always neutral. It is a big time code violation to do it otherwise. So unless this was a DIY wiring job by somehow who seriously didn't know what they were doing, your whites are neutral, except for where you connected red to white, that is a code violation and you should undo that splice. Yes, there are two travelers in a 3 way, but the red will for sure is a traveler. The blacks can be a traveler, hot or load. The way I told you to wire it, you only need to identify the hot, the others will by default end up connecting as needed.

First off, red and white should never be spliced together. Steps: 1) Find the hot. - turn off breaker - disconnect every black wire from every other black wire at each box. - turn on breaker - use volt meter to find which of the blacks is hot by touching one lead to each black and the other to a ground or neutral wire - turn off breaker 2) For simplicity, use the red traveler wire as your hot at box without native hot. Splice red to hot wire. Now red at box 2 is hot. 3) Connect red at box without native hot to hot on insteon switch. 4) Connect red/black spliced wires to hot on insteon swith at hot box. 5) One of your remaining unconnected blacks is the load wire. You don't need to figure out which it is. Just splice all the currently unused blacks together and splice one of the two insteon switches to it at either box (not both of them, just one). Cap them all off. 6) Splice your Insteon Neutrals to whites at each box 7) Splice your Insteon grounds to house ground at each box Breaker back on.