asbril

Wow Stu......... We are talking about Insteon and Zwave. Nothing else. I respect your opinion and hopefully you respect mine.

And that is why we live in a free country !

If Insteon goes out of business then there may be many devices in the market but it would likely be the end of the Insteon technology. Not so with Homeseer, GE-Jasco, Inovelli...... These are largely interchangeable. Illyoyo1, enjoy your Insteon. It is likely to work well for many more years. It was a major improvement on X10, which I used for many years. You like it and that is great.

As I said there is a multitude of opinions on this topic. As long as we are all happy with our choices, who cares ? Just one correction, if Homeseer goes out of business their switches will continue to work.

"......I personally prefer Insteon for my lights. The reason being is should my ISY fail, all of my lights will still work natively. ....". So do Zwave light switches. As I said, ISY started as Insteon and as such many in this forum have an emotional attachment to Insteon. To be fair, Insteon works fine and those having Insteon devices are generally happy. My subjective view is that Insteon depends on the PLM which fails usually after two years. There is only one manufacturer of Insteon devices. Insteon is not cheaper than Zwave, or not substantially so. If you start from zero, I would definitely recommend to use Zwave as much as you can. Zwave has been adopted by many manufacturers with every day more products. Its mesh networking works very well. ( https://inovelli.com/z-wave-vs-zigbee-vs-bluetooth-vs-wifi-smart-home-technology/ ). The advantage of ISY is that you can use both Insteon and Zwave. As such the 8-button Insteon devices may work for you. Furthermore, right now, Insteon offers a better fan~fanlight combination device. But unless Insteon makes big steps, it will be the Yahoo of home automation and Zwave will be Google..... But then again, who knows what will be around in few years ?

Many on this forum will disagree, but I am with mwester, avoid Insteon and focus on Zwave. This being said if the Insteon multi-button work to control your Zwave devices in ISY, then this may be a good start until there will be a Zwave alternative for multi-button devices.... I bet you later this year.

I love it. Also useful to include with ISY when far away from ISY unit

I lived in Amsterdam..... You don't want to have red lights in your bedroom there

Larry, Red Lights in your bedroom ?????????

I agree. For me it is same as Amazon Prime annual fee.

Indeed.... our hobby is not cheap.

Why do you need another hub ? Why not control everything with your ISY ?

If you can afford it ($ 49) I definitely recommend to get a Google Mini. It definitely works for me with "OK Google Open Curtains" or "OK Google Close Curtains" . I actually have a double tracks system and have named these separately (light curtains and dark curtains). Of course Google Home confirms action with "Turning Curtains ON" (or "OFF"), because that is the underlying instruction of the shortcut. My wife, who has no taste for my home automation, uses the Google Home curtain action all the time.

I don't know.

About a 4 weeks ago I installed my Automatic Curtains that connect to Zwave with a Mimo-lite. I resolved the ON/OFF by creating a shortcut in the Google Home App and now we manage the curtains with "OK Google Open the Curtains" and same with "Close". It works perfectly.

Teken, What is Jullie US and where can we find info ?

Not much use for Rachio here in my condo but how do you integrate the tags into ISY ?

Thanks Stu You have a few years on me but we share our concerns. With regards to my home automation skills, I go by Einstein's "Everything is relative". I am a (misunderstood) home automation hero at home but there is way too much in this forum that goes way over my head. My 2018 goal is to understand the concept of variables, which may be very simple (once I get it ).

"..... Mine can certainly create a scene though....." So does mine but don't know yet how to switch it off.

I am personally pretty happy with my combination of ISY 5.0.11b, Mobilinc and Google Home. It all works to my satisfaction. My only point was that hopefully at some point in the future Home Automation will go beyond us techies and will be friendly enough for the 'masses'. In the meantime I am sticking with the solid ISY994, its superb customer support and with you all giving me ideas and helpful advise.

Interesting but I would prefer a screen-pad (Android or Ipad) on the wall. For it to be used by my anti-tech wife, the settings would need to be very simple.

Of course they use the switches and, often unknowingly, associated programs. In that sense you are right. However making changes requires the Administrative Console. As an example I have programs for certain lights to switch on and curtains to open at wake-up time. My wife and son don't work tomorrow on MLK day and therefore the wake-up program should not work. Changing that setting must be done in the AC but hopefully soon we get a (simple) user-friendly App that even my wife and son feel comfortable using.

I am not taking sides here, but let me note the following..... I am in my mid-sixties and consider myself a low-sophisticated amateur techie. I use ISY 5.0.11B with about 60 Zwave devices, connected to Google Home with the ISY Portal. I installed about half of the switches etc myself and the others with help from a professional electrician. I understand nothing of variables, Raspberry or Polyglot. Though I added Mobilinc Pro on my wife's and son's Iphones, they do not use it. They have no access to the Administrative Console and would neither know or want to use it. The only use my wife makes of my setup is to open and close the curtains in our bedroom through Google Home. She will not even change the Nest Thermostat settings through Google Home. My big concern is that if anything happens to me, nobody in my family would know how to change my ISY programs and settings. My point is that home automation is mostly limited to techies and to those with lots of money who can afford having Control4 installed by a professional. Home automation will really take off when non-techies (my wife and sons) will be able to use it without even thinking about it. I am however optimistic that we will soon (a few years) get there, but it is the challenge for UDI, Homeseer, Smarthings etc to break out to achieve the use by more than us techies.

Todd, this may not exactly resolve your issue, but you could create programs setting the lights at a certain percentage. In Google Home you could even create shortcuts with useful names for such programs.

My only suggestion (maybe someone else has a better solution...) is to use 2 Mimo-lites.