larryllix

Call UDI support. They will get you going.

My Venstar T7900 runs my humidifier in another room. When I built my house many people told me with such a tightly sealed house a humifier would never be necessary. I didn't leave enough room on my air-handler to accomodate a humidifier after-the-fact. Sure I discovered I don't need a humidifier if I don't mind dying in my sleep from fumes and lack of oxygen. HRV's bring in extremely dry air in the winter here. It's hard to get out of bed in the morning when the static on your hair is too strong to lift your head off the pillow, each morning. ISY's your friend.

IIRC there has been a few users that have adopted links using the "absorb" method and then they had a hard time getting the links to a non-existent Hub type device out of their ISY / PLM link tables. Now the devices are doing multiple retries to get an Insteon ACK from a device that will never respond.

I would be factory reseting each device and adding them to ISY. Once a process has been set up it doesn't take that long except for battery devices somewhat. This way you know you have a clean slate for each device. They can tend to act strangely if not cleaned out first, especially from the factory. I think you will enjoy the power of your ISY so much more, being able to do compound logic programs instead of just timer events or extension of device controls. I bought two hubs and once I saw what they could do I sent one back for a refund and gave the other one away. Welcome to the forum!

Two of my son's have Nest thermostats for the last year or more. Almost every feature it has has been disabled at one time or another. The Nest "learning mode" sets a new temperature for every time somebody fiddles with the dial. After about a year you have 20-40 temperature settings at random times of each day and you need to go and delete all the "learning without intelligence". Most Nests are reported to be way out of calibration by 3-6 degrees and from forum readings nobody thinks they can be adjusted to fix. IIRC tech support told users to leave them along as they are all calibrated at the factory and don't need any further calibration". Classic know nothing electronic toy company thinking and probably most of the reason it has to memorise so many temperature adjustments. My conclusion: Not for HA enthusiasts. We are control freaks and like things our own way, not the way google tells us "Don't worry! You will love this stat. Never mind what it does." "Would you like fries / Chrome with that stat?"

You may have to quote Stu's text to get his attention like I just did to you.

All the date/time functions are there but they can't be used in the logic. If they were, the ISY engine would have to evaluate every second or minute. Something to be noted: Dates spanning the end of the year must use OR logic. Dates spanning inside the year must use AND logic. I've been caught too many times on this so I thought I should mention it. (examples already in my second program) The decimal was just for looks.

I see you have v5 installed. I use this variable creator to access dates without year restrictions (wild card). I use time program kickers to ensure it gets updated after power failures and other glitches. Set MM.DD - [ID 00B8][Parent 0006] If Time is 12:00:01AM Or Time is 3:00:01AM Or Time is 6:00:01AM Then $sISY.DayOfWeek = [Current Day of Week] $sISY.DayOfMonth = [Current Day of Month] $ISY_Date.scratchpad = [Current Day of Month] $ISY_Date.scratchpad /= 100 $ISY_Date.scratchpad += [Current Month (Jan=1, Feb=2, etc.)] $sISY.MM.DD = $ISY_Date.scratchpad Else - No Actions - (To add one, press 'Action') Then programming around dates is quite easy and permanent. No yearly changes required. Foyer Christmas Tree - [ID 00BA][Parent 00C0] If ( ( Time is Sunset - 30 minutes And ( $sISY.MM.DD >= 11.15 Or $sISY.MM.DD <= 1.06 ) ) Or ( Time is 5:00:00AM And $sISY.MM.DD >= 12.24 And $sISY.MM.DD <= 12.26 ) Or 'Master Bedroom / MBR KeyPad.C' is switched On ) And 'Master Bedroom / MBR KeyPad.C' is not switched Off Then Wait 1 second Set 'Foyer / Foyer Christmas Tree' On Wait 8 hours Run Program 'Foyer Christmas Tree' (Else Path) Else Wait 1 second Set 'Foyer / Foyer Christmas Tree' Off

The delete all links doesn't seem to do it for me and that is only incurred when linking a device not known to ISY. The factory reset (Paul's advice) of each device and restore is quick and easy and the factory reset clears out locked up program routines and data in the devices. No unassociation required in ISY.

I thought the wallwart was not available any more. Either way, it is fairly cheap and easy to cut the plug off an old 5v cell phone charger (microUSB?) and strip the wires. Leave the batteries in for backup but use good quality cells that don't leak.

Welcome to the forum! You haven't stated what firmware version you are running. V5 made a big jump in possibilities as far as making these things easier. In v5.0.9 alpha, I have periodically running time of day, and day of month, system parameter grabber programs that put DD.MM and hh.mm into decimal state variables. Triggers to look for random dates and random times could be created, easily, from the random arithmetic function built into ISY.

I use seasonal time filters in Folder conditions. The group of programs can then only run during that season and only one time based filter is required. OTOH: because folder conditions are odd / rare and not easily spotted when browsing programs I use very explanatory folder names eg: "Heating on schedule at home" This saves me a lot of digging to find why it works a year from now.

It's Electrical Safety Code.

hmmmmm.. doesn't sound very good, so far. I was going to suggest a factory reset of your ISY but being a more complex procedure you may want to initiate a support ticket request with UDI. People report them to be very responsive. There is a link with every Michel Konahim's post. IIRC you have already power cycled the PLM and ISY properly. Assuming your programs and device profiles are all still intact, have you tried to do a restore PLM again?

I would try to enable one battery device at a time, put the device into linking mode and then try to force each device query. The 1011's are normal as the general query failed on those devices, as they should have. I had trouble trying to wait for the device I put into linking mode, to get auto-queried by ISY each as the device linking mode times out and it would miss it again. I was persistent and as I got more devices stable it sped up. Now I didn't block or disable anything, so I got into a query storm with battery devices that couldn't respond and it really ground things to a halt. I would do things a little differently next time but it sounds like you did some of that, already. You'll get there. It was frustrating for me too.

I found a new PLM took hours and hours choking on every battery devie I have. I have ten MSes so it choked a lot. Once it stopped I put each battery device into linking mode and queried it only, until it behaved like I thought it should. My guess is your ISY is still choking on the massive query. You should be seeing a lot of busy bxes in the admin console. IIRC I went to bed and did my battery devices in the morning. While this was happenning I could get almost nothing to respond on my ISY. Every action took minutes.

I use Insteon SwitchLincs with many Luminus BR-40 LED bulbs and they work fine down to about 8-10% dimming. I don't see why your bulbs wouldn't work but I have no experience with this brand. Usually, problems can be cured by adding on small incandescent bulb to the circuit somewhere. I don't think you will know for sure until you actually try it. With multiple bulbs on one dimmer, your chances of working well are very high. Off glow and flicker don't usualy happen with more than one bulb on a SwitchLinc. You may exeperience some slight flickering at certain levels which you could avoid in your ISY scenes.

"Thermostat" is a reserved word for Echo/Dot and IIRC you can't name a device that without creating confusion.

Everybody knows its a thingamajig with eight whatchamacallits where the whodickies light up like whatzits. Not the thingamabob ones that look like gizmos or widgets with whatnots on them. Sent from a tiny keyboard. Response may be brief.

The Venstar was the only stat that gives out it's API for local (no cloud required) access. I like the Venstar T7800 for access via NodeLink but it seems to have a much more amateurish style than the Nest and Ecobee3. Greener grass? It's good that you chose a unit wth WiFi as then you are independent no matter what happens to your HA choices, down the road. You are dependent on a cloud interface but reading io_guy's comments, the ecobee3 is cleaner and more desirable that the Venstar. Not sure what aspects are making this opinion but he is the one that interfaced to them for us ISY users. Reading and watching reports about stats, they all have one problem or the other. Two of my son's have Nests and based on their praises of them I am glad I didn't go near them. Ecobee has contact burn out problems with A/C that has too heavy of a contactor. Venstar has a wandering sensor that I have to recalibrate about twice per year. I am very sensitive to 0.5C changes, though. I will be interested in hearing how you like the stat and may quiz you donw the road. I found the information on stats very bad and boxes contain nothing but "dreamware", where you imagine all the cools things but will never know until using one for three seasons. Even when contacting tech support I found the tech didn't know the difference between calibration stability and deadband hysteresis. Tech toy company gone HVAC?

Corner placement may make Alexa more sensitive to bass sounds also and contribute to the problem. I know speakers produce bass sounds at a much higher volume when placed into corners so maybe the same thing applies. Teken did some hinting on things he did with Alexa boxes, using some sound masking set ups. I need to do some experimenting with that. In a one large room Gathering room you don't get a lot of places to install an Alexa appliance, not only due to lack of walls, but lack of receptacles. Strangely enough, on one experiment, knowing my speakers saturate the microphones, I tried a Dot on top of the speaker columns. That worked slightly better. I tried to acoustically isolate it from the speaker cabinet with materials but that didn't help any, probably as it got higher off the cabinet and could hear the speaker front better. Thanks for the Home observation. Eliminates any jump over urge for now.

My wife usually pauses the TV when we try to talk to Alexa.I find the large speakers make Alexa almost completely deaf, no matter how low the sound is or where she is in the room. I have given up attempting to have Alexa control my AV system. She can turn it on OK but then becomes deaf. Sometime my Dot in another room will answer with two in the room I am standing in. Watch the dark blue LED pointing where she thinks the source of the sound is. When you see it spinning in every direction while you talk, it's almost useless. Other times she just "disconnects" so I am not the only one that has given up. I don't try to demostrate Alexa to guests anymore. She just embarrasses me, almost every time. If somebody else talks during the demo...she just gets confused.

I had this happen many times. From the admin console query each device and see - if the level changes - what the level is - if the combination of device levels matches any of your scenes. - if the status changes of the devices are recorded in the ISY log. I haven't had problems with this for a while but to my best guess I had a OnOff appliance module spitting out bad code that matched a scene I have. Most of the time the ISY log had an error from the device each time this happened. The cure - I unplugged it a and plugged it back in. I haven't seen the problem since, This is not conclusive but a good indication and only time will tell...never know for sure though. Just power cycling every device may fix it for you but I would want to, at least, get a suspect device first.

I prefer a combination of techniques. The best I have seen, is intiated at the remote by only sending exception reports (violates change % rules etc.) with a periodic heartbeat, usually containing a different parameter each time so that all points are absolutely updated once per every N data points x heartbeat period. Next in line, is a system that uses receiver end querying, but the remote does the same thing, sends the exception reports (data changes that violate rule limits) with one additional parameter (in a round robin fashion) each answer. In a more primitive system the additional parameter didn't happen, and the query end had to issue an all data points poll every X time. Then a flood would happen whereas every data absolute in the system was sent. With today's modern networking techniques, collisions are not usually a problem with lower protocol level, check techniques. Our LAN Ethernets live on that technique. Insteon does that fairly well. Insteon has poor checks at the higher levels. eg. ISY send a lamp On, and receives a status confirmation of On. Then what? Maybe the lamp isn't even plughed in or the triac blew last week. This could not be tolerated in an industrial control system.

In my setup I have to have both WiFis turned on because that is how they talk to each other.