weirded

Oh... That's very cool. That basically means i can use that thermostat + the ISY-99 to drive anything that generates heat. Very cool. That may be the route I'll chose (at least for the primary/big heater in the living room). Having 4x of the thermostats would be getting a bit too expensive

There will be internet, yes, so that's probably the easiest thing to do... I had looked at that, as well - I was hoping somebody had a more elegant/robust solution that didn't require me to cobble it all together. I was also thinking of using one of the Venstar thermostats -- at least I get a temperature readout in degrees without further tuning. I could probably write a program that turns the heaters on below a given temperature and back off above a given temperature. Can a program be written with thresholds relative to a setting on the thermostat? For example, if the thermostat is set to 72 degrees, turn on the heater at 70 and off at 73, but when it's set to 60, turn it on at 58 and off at 61. Though the easiest/cheapest solution may simply be to use a non-INSTEON high voltage thermostat and use INSTEON to simply turn on/off the power to the heater...

Ohh... Excellent point, I had not thought of that... I'll be sure to take some of my INSTEON stuff up there to try it out. As you said, it may not be an issue. The place in question is Kirkwood, CA, which is essentially a small town. The scale of the diesel generators is fairly big, and I would imagine they must be doing some power conditioning in order to run an entire town off it -- but it won't hurt to check.

Our vacation home has an electric water heater as well as several electric baseboard heaters. I'd like to use an ISY-99 and INSTEON components to control energy costs while the place is not occupied. The resort is powered by diesel generators, which translates into astronomically expensive electricity (48c/kWh). I'm looking for some clever ideas to accomplish having warm water and a heated home by the time we arrive there, and energy savings while the house is not occupied. Here are two things that I haven't found clever solutions for: *How to detect/predict that the place is being occupied. Ideally, this would be predictive, so the place can start heating the water/heaters as we drive up to it * How to drive the baseboard heaters in a manner that works with the ISY-99. The obvious way is to simply turn then on/off with a 220V switch, but I'd prefer a method that allowed temperature control. Unfortunately, these things require high voltage thermostats, and I don't think there is a "ready-made" solution for those. Any good ideas?