Adaptel

I have had this problem with many of my devices. IT is SO FRUSTRATING when the tact switches wear out. You walk by a light switch, tap it, hear a click, and expect the light go on. Found myself having to back up, and mash on the switch paddle until it responded. Not so great for a supposed high-end lighting solution. I called Smarthome with this issue several times and got the same blow-off response that you describe but I could not get them to warrantee anything. It really seems like they are embarrased about their early devices and want nothing to do with them. To solve it, I ended up finding a compatible replacement microswitch from digikey and had to re-solder in new switches to get them to work reliably again. Out of my 100 devices, I probably have replaced the internal micro switches on about 20 of them.

THANK YOU for agreeing with me one this! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. It is just common sense to me, especially since the hardware has always been able to do so. I guess we can't think of insteon as a "Standard", with well thought out and documented technical functionality and details laid out, but a moving target based on the whims of the engineering department at Smartlabs (oxy-moron). I guess I feel a little better that if they don't let you know this stuff, how are we supposed to know. Hey, it's Christmas time.......and everyone loves surprises. I just bought 20 new Switchlinc relay devices.that remember their on/off states during a power failure. I wonder what other surprises they will reveal, but only time will tell:) Thanks.

To you Teken: Thank for your kind and thoughtful words and putting everything into perspective. I do not participate in forums very much, and do understand how just typing what comes through your stream or thoughts do not always translate well in a text medium, so no hard feelings here. On a more positive note, I have spent about 8 hours with my ISY over the weekend, honing and improving its configuration, adding some cool functionality, removed all reliance on global ALL OFF commands, and wrote a whole ton of programs to deal with any possible unsafe situation that could possibly (but will unlikely) happen...,.especially when my ISY knows my ELK is armed, which means noone is home. And yes.....I believe that paying for alarm monitoring might seem like a waste of money, but when it comes to fire, minutes count and who is by their cell phone 24/7 to do effective self monitoring. This event was very personal and emotional because when I was in 7th grade, my childhood home caught fire in the middle of the night and burned to the ground right in front of my eyes. My family all made it out but believe me, losing your house to a fire is a profoundly horrible thing that cannot be understood unless you have experienced it yourself. I disagree on this one. I bought these SWITCHLINC RELAY devices 2 months after they went on sale in addition to many SWITCHLINC Dimmer units. The original switchlinc dimmers always defaulted OFF after a power failure (and still do) and the Switchlinc Relay units always defaulted ON after a power failure. I just want to clarify to another poster that these devices I have been talking about ARE NOT appliancelincs ......which I could possibly understand why they might be programmed to default to the ON state after power loss. My old devices, and the one that caused this fire, is a SWITCHLINC. To be exact, it it is a decora switch which looks identical to the switchlinc dimmer and the label on the back reads "Smartlabs Switchlinc V2 Relay #2476S". On the front upper metal tab, there is a sticker that says "2476S / 0707" which I am assuming that this is the model number followed my manufacturer date (July 2007). There are two labels on the front bottom mounting tab, one is the Insteon address and the other label says "v2.3 / 3920". I can assure you that these devices default to the POWER ON state INSTANTLY when they lose power for even a 1/2 second, and this behavior is due the internal behavior of the switch and is not in response to any command issued on the Insteon network. I do have the original manuals that came with these switches, and there is no mention that they are designed to behave this way. If anyone else has one of these switches, and you have them connected to switched outlets in your home.....BE CAREFUL, because you never know what might be plugged into that outlet and what might happen if that device is powered on automatically after a power outage. I have my gripes about Smartlabs, and it just doesn't make sense that they would sell a $79.00 light switch (that's how much they cost in 2007) with a brand new powerline control technology, and not have any way to update firmware in these micro controller based devices. When did a tech company ever create a device that they got 100% flawless in the firmware the first time? They have a JTAG port, but even refuse to allow customers to send devices in for reprogramming. Yes, I know this is a gripe suited for Smarthome's board.....but every interaction with them has never led to a positive outcome. I do love the technology of instone, but the company and some of their decisions are another story. If the ISY hadn't come out, I know I would have ditched my Insteon network a long time ago because all attempts that Smarthome made for a central controller product was laughable at best. I read about the security problem in another thread here, but they have no way to fix it cuz they must of thought they were immune to bugs and all these devices have no firmware upgrade capability.

I don't think the majority of the comments, and totally unrelated arguments and opinions in this thread represent "earnest exploration and problem solving". This topic spun out of control because I was pissed that I tried to solve my RANDOM ON problem by purchasing new switches and now MY ISY would issue an ALL OFF command, my new devices would NOT turn off, although they would show as being OFF in the ISY console. My F'n house almost burned down and, yes, I was pissed, but if you read my ORIGNIAL POST, I was inquiring about what appeared to be an ISY problem. In my mind, there is a problem with the ISY that needs to be addressed in firmware updates. It should either stop being able to issue ALL OFF or ALL ON commands, or know which devices will ignore these commands so that it reports the status correctly. Don't know why I posted back again, because I am just opening myself from being flamed. Never been so unwelcomed in a forum.

See the post above to the answer to your question. Answer is a big fat NO! Posting in this forum has given me absolutely no useful information besides the first reply which informed me that Smarthome removed the ALL ON and ALL OFF functionality in their newer switches. Everyone else seems to think that devices being able to randomly turn themselves on when you are not home is a great thing. Ridiculous. I am dropping out of this thread and conversation.

Gimme a break, are you serious with this nonsense? You are saying that if you SHUT OFF your water heater so it cools down to room temperature, it will turn itself back on when when the power goes out and is then restored? That is the most idiotic thing I have ever heard. NO, it resumes is AUTOMATIC OPERATION based on a thermostat if it is turned on, just like it was before the power failure. Burgler alarms have a backup battery and continue to run when the power goes out, even able to report the power loss event, and resume doing what they were doing exactly like they were before a power failure. I have a power switch on my ELK M1 Gold and if I turn it off, it stays OFF no matter how many times the power fails. It doesn't magically turn itself on. Where in anyone's home do they have a so-called "fail secure lock"?!?!?! So, if the behavior of my old Insteon switches, that almost burned my house down, are so great.......and now that Smarthome has changed this automatic-on behavior, my old switches should be worth a fortune because they have such a great feature that is no longer available in newer units, right?

Is there any other electronic device that powers on and off, either by a manual switch or by remote control, that powers itself on after a power failure when it was off before the power went out? Would anyone be ok with their tv or home AV receiver behaving this way?

With my lighting......NO. There is no reason I would turn lights on when I am not home. But if I did by accident, that would be my fault......but no matter how many people disagree with me, I still think having a switch that is capable of RANDOMLY powering on a 120v device (that can be up to 500W in these early switchlincs) is just unacceptable. Yes, that is what it boils down to....the original Insteon Switchlincs turned large current loads on randomly (like i said, power outages are random) and would you buy any type of switch that turned your stuff on RANDOMLY. Remember, this was around 6-8 years ago when I bought these switches and there wasn't any device like the ISY 994i available to write programs to monitor stuff...just the crappy windows software that barely worked. You couldn't really control your network easily outside the home, The microprocessor in these older Insteon devices DID HAVE EEPROM MEMORY IN THEM and it was laziness, or a hurry-up job on Smarthome's part to have them go to market without writing "safe" or "finished" firmware that would remember the pre power failure on/off state and rush them to market so Suckers like me would buy an unfinished product....and be punished by supporting them so early. I am so pissed off becasue when I talked to smarthome after the $500 electric bill incident, I asked if I would be able to send my devices in for a firmware upgrade, or if they would work with me at all to do an exchange....and they basically told me to go F-myself. I don't know why anyone would use an Insteon relay switch to control a fridge or sump pump and think powering ON after a power loss can be justified in any way. Bottom line is that there is a reason that the newer switches REMEMBER their last state during a power failure.....because that is the only thing that makes sense and the original hardware was CAPABLE OF DOING THIS. Even a $1.79 standard decora switch remembers it pre power failure state, this is how Insteon devices behave NOW, at it is how they should have behaved from day 1......period. Nobody will convince me otherwise. Anyone want to buy some Insteon devices that will randomly turn stuff on when you are not home? I've got 20 of them I'll give you a good deal on!!!!!!!!!

Maybe I am the only one who sees this differently. Yes, nobody should throw a flamible object on a heat generating lamp, that was my daughter's fault. This only poses a real danger is someone TURNS THIS LIGHT ON. If someone manually turned this light on, they would be in the room and would have probably noticed the problem early either by smell or when right when the smoke alarm went off. I live in a remote area and it took 20+ minutes for the fire dept to respond to the event. if the fire did take hold, the house would likely have been fully engulfed by the time they got there. Yes, these switches are controllable, but a controllable device should be just that......under the complete control of the owner of them, either by remote apps/software, or by the programs they write in their controlling devices, like the ISY. I had NO CONTROL of the behavior of what happens to these switches when the power is lost and restored. I would NEVER create a program that would automatically turn on a switched outlet (a common and accepted feature in many homes) because you never know what is plugged into them and having automatically turn on for any reason is something common sense would prevent me from doing. I had called smarthome before this nearly castastrphic event happened, explained how I thought it was ABSURD that they would design a device in this manner, and they blew me off saying "that is how they are designed to behave, it cannot be changed, and there isn't a problem).....which made NO SENSE because the early dimmer devices defauted to the OFF state. If this fire would have been serious, I am sure my insurance company would have persued this further with the maker of an electrical device that can turn loads on RANDOMLY (power loss events are random). This makes me think. Do insteon devices carry the UL certification? I thought this was mandatory on devices such as this used in American home electrical hard-wired devices. What is that weird "FTL" logo on them mean?

To clarify, the 8,000W of external lighting is controlled by 16 seperate switchlinc relay switch devices. With the older switches designed to default to the power-on state after a power blip, they act as one massive 66AMP switch that has been left on when power is restored. Although my generator can indeed run all these outdoor lights at the same time (I have tried it), it does not like them all being turned on at the exact same moment when the transfer switch kicks in (and my fridge and many many switching power supplies in comptuers and electronics pull a large initial current draw). I don't believe I need any type of load shedding because 22KW is a crapload of power and can handle any "normal use" scenario. During a power outage, I have never surpassed 15KW even when using the pool.

I plan on taking everyone's suggestions and re-writing my existing programs to reflect the behavior of my new devices. I know the potential of the Insteon, ISY 994i, and Elk M1 Gold hardware is high, and I have wanted to implement all sorts of ideas of automating more things (like using my Elks motion detectors to turn off lights in unoccupied rooms), but finding time is always the hardest part. This will give me a push in the right direction. On a related note, I done some programming (mostly on microcontrollers), but I am by no means very experienced. Much of my home's A/V equipment is controlled by an AMX/Harmon Netlinx control system and my home telephones are Mostly Cisco 7971 touch screen IP phones connected to a linux PBX In a Flash (PIAF) server. I have so wanted to tie all/some of these systems together and was wondering if anyone has any pointers on where to start. I know the Netlinx programming language quite well, and have programmed it from scratch. It has the capability of being able to communicate with any IP device in any manner, and where should I start reading about the correct protocols I should use to talk to the ISY with my AMX network. My amx system is also connected to a serial personal power consumption meter on my breaker panel and it does show me my power draw on the touch panels all the time, and via voice through the ELK system when on generator and I surpass 18kw, but it would be cool to be able to pull all these disjointed systems all together. I have AMX touch screens, but it would be nice to take advantage of the color screens on all the phones around my house (cisco uses xml on these devices).to control my lighting and cross automate all of it. Any pointers? As for my generator, I only segmented the A/Cs because they would be too much for the generator to handle, but since I have so many outages, I wanted to be able to enjoy all of my home when they occur. With 22KW of power, I could run anything i wanted during an outage if I wanted to, but under normal usage, would NEVER have all 8,000W of outdoor floodlights on at the same time.

Thanks for all your input and feedback regarding my frustrations and it is good to know that I'm not the only one who thinks the idea of a switch being able to turn on an electical load randomly IS DANGEROUS. Yes, my daughter learned a valuable lesson and that halogen desk lamp was the very LAST incandescent bulb in my entire home, and is now gone (she loved her desk lamp and didn't want to get rid of it). I was also an early adopter of LED bulbs and I have not pulled the trigger on replacing my large halogen outdoor flood lights (for a tennis court, swimming pool, and field because I have been waiting for the outdoor LED high-output floodlight technology to mature a bit because I kept reading about owners of them experiencing lots of premature failures. Plus, these lights were used infrequently and only for short periods of time, maybee a few hours/week, except when they were turn on by a power failure without anyone around to shut them off. Based on my interactions with Smarthome/Smartlabs, I find it amazing to hear that they actually worked with some people here in replacing the early Insteon devices with more modern ones at a reduced price. Can anybody give suggestions on how to go about doing this and how to approach them? I think my original devices are around 6 years old, but can't remember. It was within 2 months of them originally coming out. Among my original old devices, I have about 60 Switchlinc Dimmer 2476D v.27 and 15 Keypadlinc 2486D v.29. Some of my heavily used dimmer switches were replaced because of another bit of bad engineering. The microswitches behind the on and off paddle were not very durable and I found that after so many actuations, the switches would start failing to make positive contact, resulting in having to repeatedly tap the switch several times until the switch turns on or off. Lastly, I went with a large whole-house generator because I work from home quite frequently and cannot be disrupted during my frequent power failures. Plus, the larger "industrial grade" 1800rpm generators produce much more clean and consistent power with lower fuel consumption when compared to the cheap residential 3600rpm generators in the 8000-12,000KW range. My insteon network does surprisingly work perfectly when running on generator power because it puts out voltage at a rock solid 60Hz. And, when the power comes back on, I think it is cool that the transfer switch is smart enough that when the power is restored, it is able to wait for the exact millisecond that the generator and utility power phases are in sync with one another and can switch back to utility power without the lights even flickering.

Thank you for the info that Insteon actually removed the ALL ON and ALL OFF functionality which would explain that info....but this disturbs me because it reinforces my belief that Smarthome is "making up" the Insteon standard as they go along. It seems like the universal devices firmware still allows and trusts that the ALL ON and ALL OFF commands will turn all devices on and off as reflected in the status of the devices after the command is issued. This moving target of standards is really making me think to return all the recent devices I bought, ditch Insteon and look for some other platform that has their sh*t togehter. As for the old relay switches, and their design of powering up into the ON state....in regards to your comments about trying to use programs to turn them off after a power outage/restore, there is another reason this is a problem that I didn't mention (besides almost burning my house down). About 6 months ago, I installed a massive Kohler 22KW 2.5L 4-cylinder propane automatic backup generator to deal with my frequent power outages. When the power goes out, the generator starts up and automatically switches my entire breaker panel (except my 3 central A/C compressors) over to the generator via a 200a ASCO trasfer switch. When the transfer switch kicks in, the generator has to deal with all 8000w of lights plus all the other loads in my house powering up at the same time which causes the generator to massively struggle and it causes a serious brownout for about 10sec while it struggles to find equilibrium. Even though this generator is large enough to run everything in my house, it does not like going from producing 0W to 10-15KW instantly by having all the floodlights being on, I'm curious to know where smarthome documented these changes to the so called "Insteon Standard" and why. Did they tell Universal Devices about it? I think they need to reflect this in the firmware by either disabling the ability to issue an ALL-ON or ALL-OFF command (which results in confusing results with devices saying OFF in ISY when they are actually still on) or figuring out which devices respond to these commands and not assume all devices will turn on or off in this case.

I have a very frustrating and confusing problem with my large Insteon network and ISY994i. I am fairly technical and do not know where to turn. I have about 100 Insteon devices in my home and most of them are Switchlinc Dimmer and Switchlinc Relay untis. I was an early adopter of Insteon and purchased most of my devices within a couple months of them first coming out, with very early firmware. In my home, I had (20) 2476ST Switchlinc Relay switches (Firmware v2B) controlling many outdoor floodlights (totaling about 8000Watts) and in bedrooms which have switched outlets for lamps. I live in an area with very unreliable electrical service and lose my power quite frequently. It really bothered me that the relay switches would ALWAYS revert to the ON state whenever power was lost and then restored. I called Smarthome about this problem and talked to a teenage tech who was really rude and said that there was nothing that could be done to have the switch remember its on/off state or have them power up to the OFF state. I made this call a year ago after I returned from a 2-week vacation and realized that my power had briefly gone out the day after I left, and my 8000 Watt floodlights were on 24/7 for two weeks….leaving me with a $475 electric bill. I asked Smarthome how they would EVER decide to engineer the switch to always turn on (instead of OFF) when powered up (like the dimmer units) if they couldn’t retain their previous on/off states during a power failure. I knew an unwanted switching on of a device could pose some safety problems, but got NO ANSWERS and was pretty much blown off. I was pissed because I paid $75/piece for these switches and in my mind they were dangerous and could cost me huge money if I lost my power and wasn’t around to turn everything back off. I put it out of my mind and I was on vacation again last month, and surely enough, my power went out while I was away. I got a call from my cell phone from my alarm monitoring provider saying that there is a fire alarm in my home (from my Elk M1 Gold System) and they wanted to know if it was a false alarm. I said NO! Send the fire department because I wasn’t home!!!! Long story short, my daughter has a halogen desk lamp plugged into a switched outlet in her bedroom, and she had thrown a scarf on her desk which inadvertently landed on top of her desk lamp. When the power was restored, the lamp came on, and the scarf caught fire. Luckily the fire did not spread beyond the smoldering scarf, but this situation was no longer acceptable to me because Smarthome’s appalling engineering decisions almost caused me to lose my entire home. I did some googling and found a thread somewhere with someone else complaining about this problem, and another poster confirmed that the newer Switchlinc Relay Dual-Band switches could remember the previous On/Off states during a power failure. I should have given up on Smarthome altogether, but I dropped another $1,000 to buy 20 brand new 2477S Switchlinc On/Off units (Firmware v.45) and just got them all installed. Yes, they do remember their states when power is removed and restored, but NOW THEY DO NOT WORK PROPERLY WITH MY ISY-994i and I have no idea of what is going on. ISY PROBLEM I NEED HELP WITH: I don’t have many “Programs” in my ISY-994i Pro, but one of the programs I use the most is one that allows me to turn all my lights off by double-tapping (fast-off) certain switches near my exit doors and by pressing a certain button on keypadlincs in my bedrooms. These programs, when triggered, are set to turn my ENTIRE INSTEON NETWORK off. When I trigger my all-off program, all my OLD Insteon devices turn off as expected, but every single one of my new relay switches stay on……even though the ISY shows their states as “OFF”. If I right-click the device and do a “refresh status” the query then shows them to still be “ON”. I have tried removing and re-linking the switches, upgrading firmware of the ISY, Factory resetting and doing a restore from backup….but nothing changes and this problem remains. The device will turn off if a scene it is a member of is turned off, but they will not turn off when my program instructs the entire Insteon network to turn OFF. Is this a bug with my ISY, or a bug in the firmware of the new Relay switches? What is the difference when you send an OFF command to a scene or to the root of your whole network? Sorry this post is so long, but I am about to throw out my $4000+ Insteon investment because it seems that no matter how much money I throw at this thing, there are always frustrating problems. I would appreciate any thoughts on this.