apostolakisl

I would say it would probably be worth it to remove them. . I am sure you could find a licensed electrician looking for some side work who would replace a whole house worth of them in a day. At $40 minimum for a switchlinc and double that for KPL's, I would expect several thousand dollars worth of switches could be replaced by an electrician for just a few hundred dollars. It helps of course if you still have the old switches (which I do).

You might be OK if there is nothing conductive going to your house. In other words, PVC water pipes and all power/ground lines go from well to electric panel without entering the house.

The other thing is to make sure you only have 1 ground for your house. Try to isolate all conduction to ground to one high quality ground. If you have more than 1 ground, and lightening hits the ground near your house, the earth builds a static potential charge which will drop exponentially with distance from the strike. For example, if lightening hits a tree 10 feet from the left side of your house and you have a ground there, and then you have another ground on the right side of your house 40 feet away, the charge difference will in some part pass in the one ground, through your house, and to the other ground, since the wires in your house probably are a lower impedance path than the Earth. I like to think of it like a boat on an ocean of waves of electric potential. You want your whole house :"floating" on one point so it rises and falls together, not thrashing from side to side. The other option is to ring your house with grounds every few feet and tie them all together. This in effect makes all the grounds behave as one. But that is not very practical. This is however how high value, high risk sites are treated.

I also have 3 of the Leviton 51120-1 I put one each on my 3 panels. These do not conflict with Insteon comm. I do not really know if they work. I can tell you that while I was out of town a big lightening storm happened and I returned to find one of my Elk relays running a sprinkler zone stuck on and my OBI 110 with a fried telephone output. However, all of these fried things were on the output side of these devices, not the 120v input side. So maybe the Leviton did save things?

That seems to be what Mwarren was talking about. But it doesn't explain why the program is listed as running for an extended period of time. In fact, it should prevent that.

Weather the motion sensor is locked out or not (I don't know about this), the fact that he says the program is listed as running means that it must be getting re-triggered since the program should end in about 12 seconds or so. A re-trigger should start the program over and cause the lights to keep blinking. It seems like that is not happening, but I don't know. Try splitting the program in two and disabling the trigger. Program 1 If motion detector is switched on then run program 2 disable program 1 Program 2 If blank repeat 3 times light on wait 2 sec light off wait 2 sec repeat 1 time enable program 1

Insteon 3 way is very different. A regular 3-way setup has both switches switching power back and forth between 2 wires that go between the 2 switches which then either powers or doesn't power the fixture depending on which way the 2 switches are positioned. With Insteon, only one of the switches actually switches power to the fixture, the other switches (when properly programmed) simply instructs the controlling switch to turn power on/off using the power line or radio communications. In this way, the 2 (or more) switches do not have to be directly connected to each other.

That is because you need to turn the scene on from ISY, not a single switch (assuming you want to turn the scene on). A single switch receiving a command to turn on just turns itself on, it does not activate the scene. Think about it for a minute. If turning on a switch from another device caused the switch to trigger a scene that it controls, then you could never have a switch be a responder of any other scenes. Every time you would turn that device on, then the scene would turn on. This defeats much of the versatility of Insteon. A switch can be a member of multiple scenes to which it only responds, and a controller of one. Also understand that the PLM/ISY is a controller of every device individually. In other words, ISY is basically a controller of a 2 member scene for every single device you have (ISY is one member and the device the other). Also keep in mind that some switches have multiple nodes (like the 6 and 8 button kpl's) so each button can be a controller or reponsder in scenes separately. .. as though they were multiple devices. A switch will only send out a scene command if 1) it is set of a controller of that scene and 2) you act directly on that switch (you actually push the button on the switch).

ISY can "crawl" you network. Basically, it will start with one or more devices check the links, go find those devices, add them, check their links, go find them, and so on and so forth. Unless your "buried" devices live on an "insteon island" they will probably be captured by a system crawl. Once this is done, ISY will display every single device and the Insteon address under the "my lighting" button in the main tree. If you are happy with how everything is setup and linked, you can use it that way. Or, you could make a list of all the devices and their addresses, delete the whole thing, and start over from scratch wiping each device as you add it. Then create your links from scratch.

Good to hear Michel. Taking things into your own hands sadly would seem to be the only way with SH. Put me on the list of those in need!

That is because the Elk module license is applied to your dad's original isy. You will need to contact UD and have them migrate the license to the ISY your gave your dad.

That seems to be new. I am almost 100% sure that it used to be that dimmers had the option of "on" and "100%" in programs, though they were treated identically. It makes sense to not have both 100% and on since they are identical, so if indeed "on" was removed, it makes perfect sense.

I suppose you could write a program that queries a device every minute or so and send an email/text if it fails to respond, along with that, the program would enable a second program and disable itself. The second program sends an email/text when the device does respond, and then disables itself and re-enables the first program. The length of time between the 2 emails/texts is how long the power was out for. Of course your UPS would need to keep working and powering your router/isy/modem the whole time.

You can use a webcontrol board from CAI and connect a 1-wire thermometer to it. CAI will post directly to ISY variables on any kind of schedule you want. You will have to write a small program on the CAI board, but it could be as few as 4 lines. This can be done for less than $50, though you will need ethernet at the CAI or you will need to spend another $30 for a wifi adapter.

Yes, it sounds like you have it. You can also have multiple scenes with the same members in it but set to different levels. Or multiple scenes where they are almost the same but contain a few extra items. Like I have one scene that I use to turn all the evening lights on, then the lights get turned off in 2 stages where some of the get turned off in the first stage (which I created a scene for) and then the rest in a second stage (which I actually use the original scene to turn off).

ISY uses the ID number, not a name to reference variables internally. The name is only there for your convenience. If you import the programs I wrote, or for that matter any program that references a variable, it references the variable at an ID # location and then whatever name you have assigned to that number gets substituted for the number in the GUI. So, if the variable at an ID# is already being used for something else, you will either have to point my program to a different ID# or point your previous program to that different ID#. It is not terribly complicated, however, since ISY has a find/replace feature. Prior to importing the program, do a find/replace on your current programs to move their variables to locations that won't be used by the importing programs. It can be done in a minute or two. All the ID's that are used in my programs can be seen in the included screen shots.

As others have said plus a few more comments. Scenes are built-in to the Insteon devices themselves. ISY is a great tool to program the scene into the devices, but once programmed into the devices, the scene will function even without ISY present. ISY is by default a member of every scene (actually the PLM), but it need not be present for the scene to work. Scenes are activated by a single Insteon command. So it is much less traffic than a program which sends out as many Insteon commands as you have listed in your program. And as mentioned, scenes are much faster than programs which have to pause a bit between each Insteon command. Generally speaking, I never have a program activate more than one device/scene. Whatever I want, I create a scene. Then, I might use a program to turn that scene on or off as needed based on conditions that I set in the program. A classic example being your night time scene which activates based on sun position/time of day. All the lights that I want to turn on at night in that fashion are a member of one scene.

You can install this set of programs, which includes an every 3rd day program, plus all the other date functions you might ever want. http://wiki.universal-devices.com/index ... _Variables

He edited his post yesterday pointing out that he made a silly mistake accidentally commanding the lights to turn on when he meant to put off.

That is why I used "control is switched on" for your tv. It will only be true when the tv is switched from off to on (at least with a synchrolinc). I misunderstood on the light on/off, thought you wanted the light to turn on with the tv, not off. So swap on for off and vice-versa on the lights. Be aware, that for "if status is on" you might instead say "if status is not off" since "not off" encompasses all the dimmed states whereas "on" means 100% only.

Programs do not "run the entire time". The program only runs when it is triggered and then it is done. This program will trigger on any change in the light status, but that will always cause a false, which is blank, so it is meaningless. The important point is the program will also trigger when the tv is turned on (incidentally, I don't know what you are using to turn your tv on, and this could be important). And then, it will only run tru if the light is off. The jist of this, is that the second program will only run true (and turn the light off) if it was the act of turning the tv on that caused the light to turn on in the first place. If the light was already on when you turned the tv on, the second program won't run when you turn the tv off and the light will staff on, because the variable would never have been set to 1.

You could use a variable. I think this should do it, but it might have some bugs as I haven't fully vetted it. If status Light is off and control tv is switched on Then set light on set $tvlight to 1 Else . . . If $tvlight = 1 and Control tv is switched off Then set light off set $tvlight = 0 Else - --

Actually we very much like our front load Samsung unit. It gets the clothes very clean. And they get spun so close to dry that they would never sit for days wet since they actually dry in the washer in less than a day if let to sit. I have the Samsung unit at my office as well for medical stuff and it is tremendous with sani cycle and all. Our first generation front loader was not so good and we got rid of it.

I wouldn't say they get urine smell. It is just a musty odor as happens with stuff that is wet. It is like a 24 hour problem, not a few hours. Regardless of smell, the implications of forgetting clothes in the washer is going to be worse than the dryer. 1) Laundry in the dryer can't be pulled out and worn on the spot. So the implication of forgetting in the washer is that the piece of clothing is unwearable vs the dryer where you just have to dig it out. 2) If you forget in the washer for too long, it dries in there. Then it needs to be rewashed unless you like to wear cardboard. 3) The front load washers typically run longer than the dryer since they seem to do more fancy cycles and since they spin the clothes so close to dry. We have wash cycles that usually last close to an hour and the dryer usually is more like 30 to 40 minutes. 4) All of the clothes we wash at home don't wrinkle since the wrinkle guard on the dryer does a great job of keeping them fluffed until it is cooled off at which point wrinkling isn't really an issue. The cotton dress shirts need ironing no matter what and therefore they go to the cleaners (we don't iron) 5) Not sure why cold clothes are a problem (as long as they are dry). Gas dryer does simply things since they run on 120. But the wrinkle guard throws a twist into your program regardless of gas or electric. You would presumably want to be warned as soon as it finishes, but you wouldn't want to keep getting warned every few minutes when it does the wrinkle guard thing. Maybe set a variable after the synchrolinc is on for more than 10 minutes to 1 and when the synchrolinc turns off it switches the variable to 0 which is the trigger for notification. That way the wrinkle guard cycle doesn't keep notifying you since it doesn't run long enough to be considered.

I just monitor the washer. Monitoring the dryer doesn't add a lot. Forgetting laundry in the washer and you end up with a stinky mess. Also, when you forget it in the washer it isn't ready to wear. Forgetting it in the dryer really doesn't amount to much trouble. You can always pull the clothes out and put it straight on. Aside from the clothes maybe getting wrinkled, there isn't much to gain from dryer finish notification. Generally the washer time is longer than the dryer time, so the next load from the washer should be able to go right in without needing another notification from the dryer. Having said that, to be a purist, you want to know. If it were me, I would open the dryer, interrupt the wires to the drum motor, put a standard wall socket on the hot side, and a plug on the motor side. Put your IO linc in between and that should work. Of course you might void your warranty.