KeviNH

The connection from ISY to PLM uses 3 wires; IIRC, the serial communication uses pins 1,7,8 and runs at 19,200 bits/second (baud); That is a slow enough bitrate that the connection should be generally forgiving of the usual issues that come with long cable runs. Short answer: Depending who you ask, the maximum is 7.6 meters, 50 feet, or the cable length equal to a capacitance of 2500pF. There is no specific maximum stated in the ISY Wiki. Real world experience says good cable can be used to get +25 feet reliably. My ISY994 is 30 feet from my PLM, extended using standard Cat5e off a bulk spool, connected via ethernet patch panels. See the old thread.

I agree -- low humidity results in mostly cosmetic issues, gaps in floors and drafty doors and windows. Friends moved from the Midwest to the West; Three years after moving to the high desert (outdoor humidity generally in the range of 15-25% RH) their old wood furniture started to fail, mostly coming apart at glued joints. It is difficult to keep cigars in good condition, gotta use a tupperdor. So even at the crazy low < 25% levels, actual damage took years.

I'm a "set it an forget it" kind of person, so in the winter I turn on the humidifier and just try to keep the interior above 40% RH (can be tough when using the wood stove). And in the summer I try to keep the humidity below 55%. I went with the opposite approach -- I let the (Honeywell Z-Wave) programmable thermostat do it's thing, and just have the ISY controlling it when I need to override the programmed schedule. For example put the Honeywell into "Energy Save" (setback) mode when ISY knows there is nobody home, and set it back to following the schedule when either Geofencing or an explicit command tells ISY that I'm headed back home. Unless you have an expensive art or stamp collection, it's not quite that dire -- for damage to wood furniture you'd have to let humidity reach the extremes of high or low levels to have problems. Floating around 50% +/- 10% is fine. If you have pets and live in an area with fleas and ticks, indoor humidity below 50% makes more difficult for insects to thrive in the living area.

How about the Ecolink Z-Wave Plus Automated Light Switch (TLS-ZWAVE5)? It uses 2 AA batteries and flips a standard light switch on or off. The switch being flipped could just as easily be low-voltage. Somebody must have taken a Schlage Z-Wave door lock, bolted a roller switch to it so the bolt closes the switch when extended.

In my case, ice dam prevention isn't so much about the current rate of snowfall as it is about dealing with water coming off the roof while snow is melting --once snow has accumulated on the roof (melting all the snow as it falls is economically infeasible in Northern New England), then certain weather conditions, exacerbated by roof geometry and/or poor roof design) can lead to ice dams even if the living space is optimally insulated. Ice and Water Shield helps, I even replaced the most problematic roof with rolled steel roofing. I have heat tape for ice dam mitigation; it doesn't actually fully clear my roof of snow, but rather works to ensure there is a clear channel for water to make it off the roof instead of backing up behind an ice dam. Here's a link to the programs I use for controlling the heat tape: https://forum.universal-devices.com/topic/21363-weather-module-configuration-polling-interval/?do=findComment&comment=207798 I had a fair amount of trouble with this program before I realized that the climate module may cause re-evaluation of program conditions every time ISY polls for weather data, and that I needed to run the heat tape when there's snow on the roof and conditions make it likely to thaw and then freeze. I also added a variable to override the weather check, force heating even if weather doesn't meet the conditions.

If you have an Insteon motion sensor and an Insteon siren, you could choose to manually link the siren as a responder for the motion sensor. This avoids the need for the siren to be supported by the ISY994. See "Local Programming Features" in the siren user manual. Yes, Z-Wave strobe/alert/etc would be an option. however you'd need to do this with an ISY program rather than with an Insteon scene.

Most of the fancy WiFi thermostats sold for consumer use are cloud-tethered; any control has to go through a cloud server, not accessible locally, and sometimes only usable via a smartphone app, no public API. If you want local automation control, you're going to find slim pickings at Home Depot. Honeywell and Trane do offer full-color touchscreen thermostats with Z-Wave.

I use "Deoxit" on older, oxidized-looking plugs and their sockets. Silicone grease or better yet, purpose-designed Dielectric Grease is useful for anything electrical. For an item that may not be removed for quite some time, especially light bulbs, I'll wipe a bit of dielectric grease across the entire base of the bulb, helps ensure it comes out in one piece, even years later. Another useful product is Ox-Gard; required for making connections between aluminum and copper wire, it's basically an oil-based grease carrying zinc, unlike Silicone/Dieletric grease, this compound is actually conductive and should only be applied to the bare metal conductors, never to the insulated bits.

For that application, perhaps program the micro module for "dual momentary" mode and set the PIR's on duration as low as you can.

Floodlights with a PIR in the same enclosure run the PIR on the same 120VAC as the lights, for example the really old school 3-hole box incandescent floods, wired like this: Becomes this:

My day job includes installing DPI and proxy hardware, including TLS MITM Proxies. With only DPI, the eavesdropper can only intercept usernames, passwords and URLs for unencrypted traffic (e.g. http); They need to add on a MITM proxy to see this level of detail for encrypted traffic (e.g. https or another TLS/SSL protocol). For personal and other small-scale use, self-signed (or better yet, private-CA) certificates can be just as secure as expensive certificates, when done right. Most mobile devices and computers allow you to import your private-CA or self-signed public key. Do this before you connect the first time, and self-signed is no worse off than any other certificate. Next, require client certificates for real protection against MITM proxies (Not all client apps support using a client certificate). The ISY994 supports client certificates. I doubt Mobilinc does, and I believe at least some parts of Tasker have experimental support for client certs. This approach actually works great for personal use, but is difficult to scale up to a service that you want to offer to many different users on many different computers, as each computer would require manually importing both keys before it can be used securely. When using the ISY portal, you have a whole different set of risks to consider, especially when looking at how to "make my tasker to portal connection more secure".

The ISY normally accepts only encrypted traffic on port 443, this mens the protocol is TLS (SSL, with https:// URLs), and the entire URL and any content is encrypted in transit (unless somebody in the middle is doing something nasty). This includes the username and password. While the "query string" may show the user and password, usually it is parsed by the app and sent obfuscated in a header. Either way, with TLS, the full URL is not exposed in transit, but may be readable by anybody who can see you screen or access the app's configuration settings (e.g. Apple, your employer, etc). While it's kind of a headache to do with ISY994, you could use the Free LetsEncrypt certificates instead of self-signed. Adding a certificate is low-risk, just don't set the "Verify" checkbox (see the security guide for details)

Once you've converted all your lights to LED, the system can just guess what rooms you're likely to enter in the near future, and if it turns on extra lights, no big deal, minimal electricity wasted.

I don't know if the Foscam R2 offers a URL that will fetch an image from the camera-- documentation is poor at best. Even with a URL that returns a snapshot, you can't just call snapshot.cgi from a Network Resource, as ISY994 doesn't support reading the binary response from the camera (a large .JPG file) in reply to a Network Resource nor can ISY994 email it to you -- there needs to be an always on computer/rPi/etc to handle reading in the picture and sending out the email. All that giant URL does is turn on the motion detection feature of the Foscam. You could use another giant URL to turn it off again.

Most solutions need a URL that will fetch an image from the camera. They also require a computer that is always on, be it an Ubuntu host, Blue Iris, rPi, etc. You could leave motion turned off on the Foscam, and then use a network resource like this to enable it when somebody is at the door: http://xxxxxx.xxx:00/cgi-bin/CGIProxy.fcgi?cmd=setMotionDetectConfig1&isEnable=1&linkage=14&snapInterval=2&triggerInterval=6&isMovAlarmEnable=1&isPirAlarmEnable=1&schedule0=281474976710655&schedule1=281474976710655&schedule2=281474976710655&schedule3=281474976710655&schedule4=281474976710655&schedule5=281474976710655&schedule6=281474976710655&x1=56y1=103&width1=10000&height1=10000&sensitivity1=0&valid1=1&x2=0&y2=0&width2=0&height2=0&sensitivity2=2&valid2=0&x3=0&y3=0&width3=0&height3=0&sensitivity3=3&valid3=0&x4=0y4=0&width4=0&height4=0&sensitivity4=3&valid4=0&usr=admin&pwd=***** The Foscam R2 is kind of buggy, it's an Amba S2L with some slightly modified commands not exactly supporting the standard Foscam APIs. In theory you could do /cgi-bin/CGIProxy.fcgi?cmd=setSMTPConfig&receiver=... to override the email desitnation temporarily to add your email address to the email destination (by putting a , in between) and then a few minutes later, remove the extra email address from the list of destinations. But I don't have a Foscam any more, so can't say for sure.

Try moving the actions into a separate program, like so: Well Pump Low - [ID 0059][Parent 0001] If 'Well Pump On-Off ZW 057 / ZW 057 Energy Meter' Status > 200.000 Watts And 'Well Pump On-Off ZW 057 / ZW 057 Energy Meter' Status < 900.000 Watts Then Send Notification to 'Robert' content 'Power' Set Elk Output 'Output 111' On Wait 30 seconds Run Program Cycle Well Pump Else Set Elk Output 'Output 111' Off Everything with a wait involved goes into the second program: Cycle Well Pump - [ID 005A][Parent 0001] If No Conditions Then Set 'Well Pump On-Off ZW 057' Off Wait 2 minutes Set 'Well Pump On-Off ZW 057' On $i.WellPumpCycleCount+=1 Send Notification to 'Robert' content 'Cycled well pump' Else - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action') From the Wiki: The program's conditions are reevaluated each time a Wait or Repeat statement is encountered, and at the end of each iteration of a Repeat loop. So what's happening is that when each "wait" clause is encountered, the conditions (if any) are re-evaluated, and since the Wattage is zero when off, the condition is false and the execution stops. By using a separate program, there are no conditions to re-evaluate.

Nest can already predict when you're going to be at home, anticipatory lighting is the next step in the development of the Google home.

I have a program called "Phil Connors"; runs at sunrise every day. At sunrise Phil resets several variables and enables/disables all programs that are normally enabled or disabled, basically setting everything back to my defaults. That way any override I might have made during the previous day is undone at dawn. Personally, for the majority of my Insteon motion sensors, I have the MS as a controller for the scene. That ensures the floodlights come on immediately on motion, and works 100% of the time, has no dependency/delay on the ISY. To make this work reasonably with floodlights in a yard that is used for socializing, I put the yard lights on a dimmer and have a "disable yard motion" program which calls "Adjust Scene" to set the responder on level to 1%, sleep for 4 hours, then uses "adjust scene" again to reset the on level to 100%. I chose not to have Phil do the resetting of the on level every day at dawn only because I was being overly cautious of write cycles to the flash memory in the dimmer switch.

Some of the Smarthome kits still have that old text about not needing a power supply, Most of the kits do include a power supply.

Do you mean Network Resources? It might be possible, depending on your particular cell carrier -- some still offer a web gateway, or can be reached via a commercial web-to-SMS service (usually these charge a monthly fee). Most carriers offer a public SMS gateway where you send a plaintext email (e.g. via Notifications) to a specific email address, and it is forwarded as an SMS to the recipient. These generally have very strict anti-spam and rate-limiting, so sometimes if you send the same message multiple times, only the first one is delivered. E.g. for a Sprint user in New Hampshire with phone number 222-3333, you'd email to 6032223333@messaging.sprintpcs.com

I agree -- I'd hesitate to use "Repeat Every 1 second" unless I really needed that level of granularity. I track HVAC runtime with this technique, but only to the nearest whole minute.

Synchro-Linc is definitely the easy and cost-effective way, and has the advantage of not risking accidentally turning off a remote-controlled switch and forgetting to turn it back on. I would add the Synchro-Linc as a controller for a scene with a rarely used light, then you might notice the sump pump is acting erratically just from seeing the light.

Is there a thread showing how to use IFTTT with ISY994 without ISY Portal?

My goal is to convert over to using ESP32 for both control and status. I just need to get a few more low-current relays. I picked up a spare Open/Close sensor last time they were on sale at $20 (Amazon, free prime shipping). Instead of using the magnet, I wired a mercury tilt switch to the screw contacts, and attached the whole unit to an upper panel of the door. I set the angle of the tilt switch so the sensor is "closed" when the garage door is down, or at least mostly down. I like this solution better than using the reed switch and magnet because it still reads closed even if the door is open a couple of inches, as happens sometimes in winter when ice builds up in the opening.

I've been slowly moving to ZWave motion sensors anywhere I don't actually need the sensor to trigger an Insteon scene directly.