MarkJames

As I replace some of my original switches that have failed I find myself wondering just how old they are. I've had Insteon in the house for some 15 or more years. I removed one today that is a Switchlinc V2 #2476D. There is a small number on the label that says 0713 under the 2476D designation. There's another sticker that says V3.1 00618 and the insteon address on it is 0A.54.08 Is there a way to determine how old this is? Thanks!

Thanks. I already went ahead and got the ecobee. I'm pretty happy with it - lots of functionality. I share my HA efforts between ISY and Homeseer HS3. HS3 has a plugin that fully controls the Ecobee so that's worked out really well. You can get status and control all functionality of the thermostat as well as read occupancy and temperature data from the room sensors. Doing so gives you the side benefit of adding 4 motion sensors and 4 room temperature sensors all at once! mark

Thanks Michel but no need. Moving my PLM has completely solved the problem mark

That's interesting. I have what I would consider to be a reasonably large installation. 140 or so devices scattered across 5 buildings and six electrical panels. The farthest building is some 300ft from the main house. Every single electrical switch and light is insteon controlled plus some outlets plus my 12 zone irrigation system through 2 EZ-Floras. I moved my GDO functions to my Elk system when the PLM all-on problem was an issue. To compound it even more I have a complicated electrical metering system in my home. Back in the '80s the electric company offered a system where you could do something like this power line ---> main meter ----> main panel ---> subfeed (100A) ----> second meter ----> sub panel for heating ------> feed all heating/cooling equipment. For billing they took the total electrical use, subtracted off the heating use, charged the non-heating use at the regular rate and charged the heating use at 50% The deal was that they had the right to turn off your heating use if there was a power shortage so you were required to have a secondary heating source (fireplaces). In the 35 year history of the program, though, they never once exercised that right. The program is over now but it's grandfathered till I sell the house. that means I get my heating power at about 5 cents/kwh. It's a great deal! The reason I mention this is because my HA stuff is on the heating side of the meter for convenience reasons. Early insteon (and X10 - I started with that and Stargate) had a very hard time with this situation. The powerline signals were severely degraded going back through the meter to the main panel and then out to the devices they controlled. Initially Insteon was quite flaky - way better than X10 which was borderline useless for me - but I've stuck with it and in the last few years the technology has matured to where I really don't have any issues with it whatsoever (save for PLM failures which seem to (I hope) be over). While older devices have failed - that's true - the new ones that replace them seem both more robust and have more features. At this point I seem to have enough dual band devices installed that I don't have a single access point, filter, repeater, etc. Just the devices themselves and a phase coupler. I'll probably venture a bit into some z-wave to see what it's all about but tbh I don't have many complaints with Insteon anymore.

I just looked at the cost of them. They're quite a bit more expensive than Insteon as well. At this moment I'm not in need of any new switches. But I'm gonna keep them in mind for the inevitable failure of some of my many insteon devices. mark

Nice! That's very interesting - thanks Mike. I don't have the Z-wave dongle for my 994IR yet - I'm considering it if only for the goofing around factor of Z-wave locks. I keep getting close to buying one but I have a few touchpad locks already so it's not really a big deal to just give whoever I want a disposable code then change it later (or not depending on who it is) My understanding is that Zwave takes a number of devices in order to solidify the mesh network that supports it. I imagine the larger the property the more devices that would be? mark

I wish I understood electrical issues. I know enough to be able to wire a house with no problem (yes, including 3-way and 4-way switches!) but that's as far as it goes.

lol - same same Second one for me. I had a surge destroy the first one. Better the protector than everything past it, though!

AFAIK z-wave doesn't have fast-on/fast-off. That's a deal killer for me. Plus there are just so many more types of devices available for Insteon. I'm not going to be filtering anything. I just moved my PLM and everything is back to hunky-dunky. While the older Insteon devices failed quite often and were slow to read/write I find that the new generation - particularly the dual band - are more or less bulletproof. They read/write much faster, react virtually instantly to group on/offs, and have the fast-on/fast-off capability that I use a lot of. mark

Actually working again with a caveat NOT working in the outlet that was the problem. That's pretty odd. The only thing I can think of is that I had a new heat pump wired in last week and perhaps something changed about the circuit it was on. I'll spend some time later checking out that outlet and see if it's lost neutral or ground or something. I'm pretty sure Insteon doesn't care about ground but maybe it's noise from the heatpump circuit or some other electrical reason that I'm not savvy enough to understand. Weird, weird, weird,

Yup - working again! I have NO idea what was wrong and, tbh, I don't care - I'm just glad it's a) working and I didn't have to buy yet another new PLM. mark

Yup - it's booting now and getting device status messages again. I'm gonna have to restore my PLM yet once it's queried all the devices but I think it's gonna be OK. Whew! That was very weird. My PLM, as it turns out, is fine. It seems to be something related to the outlet the PLM was plugged in to. Once all is working fine again I'm gonna move the PLM back to the original outlet and see if that is, indeed, the case. Again - thanks for helping out, Paul. It sucks being stuck with stuff like this. mark

May be some progress here. I've plugged the PLM in to a different outlet and now I can link from my blank ISY. So I reset my original PLM and plugged it into that outlet and I can link from the blank ISY with that too. At the moment I'm restoring my last backup and hopefully things will improve after that. The only concern I have is that my ISY is on 4.5.4 and my backup is 4.4.6. I hope that doesn't matter Thanks for the help, Paul. mark

Well - now I've factory reset the ISY, factory reset a brand new PLM, and replaced my network cable just for good measure. I put the blank ISY in linking mode but I cannot link anything to it. I tried entering the address of a known good device that's plugged in and powered up but it won't detect it. I'm completely stumped.

Well this is getting more and more confusing. So I restored my last backup and rebooted. I'm sitting here waiting (I think I'll go out for a bit) as it goes through every single device again Event viewer is nothing but ERR 1. I can't imagine that I have the same problem with a PLM that's less than a year old AND a brand new one out of the box. I've had half a dozen PLMs fail over the years and this isn't the way they've acted. ISY can't seem to communicate with any devices at all - not one. I'm not really sure what to try next. I already switched outlets for the PLM to see if something weird happened to that circuit and th at made no difference either. Do you know if there's a way to wipe the ISY clean and just try it out empty so I don't have to go through this each time?

Yeah - It's looking more and more like the ISY has somehow gotten corrupted. I got the PLM links to write but I still have no communication with any of my devices. I'll try restoring my last backup and see what's up. It'd sure be nice if there was a way to stop it from going through every single device when I reboot. Even now as I'm restoring it keeps coming up with 'failed to communicate' errors. mark

I dunno wtf has happened but it's starting to worry me. My system started coming up with 'cannot communicate with ' for every single device. I restarted the ISY and it came up in safe mode So I reset my PLM and reboot everything and ISY connected to it fine - no safe mode this time. But when it came up it took like an hour and a half going through every device getting an ERR 1 and putting an exclamation point beside each item it in my device tree. I have something like 140 devices so it took ages. So I reset and restored the PLM. It 'looked' like it quickly wrote PLM links with success msgs (it went by very quickly - maybe 2 seconds?) and gave me a reset PLM message. But when I do the diagnostic on my PLM and show PLM links table it's empty though it does show connected. So I figured my PLM might have issues - though ISY seems happy with it. I pulled out a brand new one (2.2 v9E) and plugged that in. I did a restore PLM on that and it looked/acted the same as the first time and again I have no PLM links in the table. I'm a bit stumped now. Any suggestions? I have no ISY communication with ANY of my devices. mark

I'll let you know how they work out. While I'd rather control them from my HA system I suppose the sensors in the different areas provide an 'out of the box' solution that is probably as elegant as anything I'd write after bumbling through it for a while. I have my hands full with other HA issues right now so I'm not inclined to pile even more on As it is my floor heat thermostats from Nuheat allow me to control them over the web but only through the mfr website. At least it fulfills my needs when it comes to travel/warming up the house before we get home. As of 5 minutes ago my new heat pump has just been powered up for the first time - it's wonderful! mark

Thanks - I'll order another Raspi and give it a whirl. Gotta get to it before the spring weather arrives up here in the great white North and I can get outside finally! I ended up ordering the 3 sensor ecobee bundle. It supported my heatpump with auxiliary heat and - surprisingly - it's made here in Canada! mark

That looks very interesting. You can control your Sonos from your HA system? That'd be worth it for me alone! How do I go about getting the upgraded firmware? I only see the 4.5 line of firmware in the relevant thread? mark

Can I ask a dumb question that I should probably spend some time researching but I'm up to my elbows in alligators and it's easier to just ask? What's nodelink do and why might I want to use it? Thanks! mark

Oh ok - that makes sense. My home used to do that too - 2 stories - all one zone on hot water baseboard. I broke it up into 3 zones using zone valves but then found that the original owner had run the pipes for the hot water up and down and back and forth so some zones had a room upstairs and a room downstairs on one zone. It was a bit of a mess. We've since changed to a mini split system after that one failed. I wish manufacturers would get away from this cloud thing and give us all APIs. mark

Do you have 4 zones? Or are you using them to control fewer zones? mark

It looks like I'm compatible - I just don't know what the functionality is from a HA controller without going through a cloud service. Setpoint? Schedule change? heat/cool mode? System on/off? setback? How much fuss is polyglot and nodelink? Nest are pretty cool - I'm just not sure how much more effort I want to put into this. mark

Thanks guys, When this heatpump goes in (today, I hope) I will have 3 different heating systems in the house and only one that I can deal with remotely. I have in floor electric heating in my kitchen and living room that are wifi controllable with Nuheat but their system is not accessible to IFTTT or any HA controllers (yet anyways). I don't care too much about this - the reaction time on floor heat is so very slow that it doesn't lend itself to any kind of occupancy control - more like a set and forget or disable while you're away. My kids rooms (they've moved away now), master bedroom, and media room are all on a Fujitsu DC motor heat pump system with individual room thermostats. These do some sort of proprietary communication with the Fujitsu master controller so they are not able to be controlled with my HA system either. That leaves the main living areas which will have the new heat pump that I can control however I want. Occupancy isn't really a big deal for me and the heatpump is a single zone so the Ecobee might not be right. For occupancy I've set up my system to watch for the wifi signal and bluetooth signals on both my phone and my wife's. Using that and Tasker, I set flags based on whether we're coming home or leaving based. All I really need to be able to do is turn the system on/off, *maybe* adjust setpoints, and possibly adjust the schedule if we're travelling. I've heard good things about zwave but if I got a zwave thermostat it would be the only zwave device I have. What kind of functionality do the insteon ones have? mark