xlurkr

I've been living in the same place for >30 years, and I can imagine moving out in the next 5-10. I've always planned on needing to hire an electrician to restore all the switches to dumb ones. The thermostat is an Insteon-upgraded Venstar, so I'll remove the adapter and leave the manual for it. The only other thing that's embedded is in-wall and in-ceiling speakers, and I guess we'll have to negotiate whether they stay, or I take them out and have someone patch the drywall. Probably the latter. Everything else in my automated world is easily unplugged and removed. -Tom

This could be the thing that gets me to upgrade to eisy from my Polisy. -Tom

I had forgotten about this great advantage to employing an ISY. I've had to do this three times I can recall - one Togglelinc and three KPLs, and the latter had a lot of links and programming associated with them. In all cases, it took longer to screw the cover plate back on than to have the ISY program the device. -Tom

Well, if it's already set up like my home ISY is, the obvious answer is that you can leverage the work that went into that, rather than redo it. But starting from scratch, that's not an issue. The other reason is that, to the extent that you want to manage your Insteon on an ongoing basis, and I do because I love to tinker, any ISY including Polisy makes that super easy. Since I started with Insteon, I got enamored of its links-based protocol that a) allows some sophisticated automations to work, even when the controller is unresponsive and b) eliminated the "popcorn" effect that other protocols and controllers suffer from. If those things don't matter, you don't need links, and you probably don't need a UDI device. -Tom

Short answer - all devices and automations on Polisy, HA running on a relatively-new Yellow. I'm new to HA. I had set up my permanent home with about 25 switches and dimmers, and created quite a few automations, scenes, NRs, etc. that are triggered by KPL buttons, motions, open/close sensors, double-clicks and so on. That's on an ISY, and its uber-controller is CQC. No HA (yet) in that location. I'm temporarily renting an apartment for a remote job assignment, and I've gone kinda hog-wild here. This is where I have a Polisy, but it's only controlling a few plug-in Insteon and Z-Wave devices, since I can't monkey with the switches here. It's also running NSs for Elk and Hubitat. I'm running a Hubitat to control a bunch of Lutron Grafik Eye units that I wired up with extension cords that lamps are plugged into. That's most of my lighting. And there's some Hue, so I can have a colored bulb and use some Lutron Aurora gizmos that fit over switches and keep them from being switched off, while adding a rotating ring for dimming. Very useful for someone renting like me. Finally, my rental comes with 2 Z-Wave lights, a thermostat, and a lock that are controlled by a controller I don't own and have no access to. I got the Yellow just to tinker, frankly, and because of its reputation for supporting a lot of stuff, for free. It found a ton of things in my apartment, so that's cool. But I don't rely on it for anything at the moment. I'm returning home soon, and I'll take the Yellow with me, and probably replace the CQC system with it as the new uber controller. The CQC currently ties together my ISY, my Russound whole house audio system, and all my home theater gear via a URC Total Control system. -Tom

Sorry to anyone I offended with the suggestion of moving. I thought we had strayed into a discussion of removing ISY and replacing with HA or using HA only from the get-go. And even then, I understand how the conversation would be useful to many in this community - including me! I'm just always mindful of who is hosting this space, and I'm grateful that they're doing so, too. -Tom

That's what "no radios" means. No dongle, no hardware to receive RF signals. And if you get a new dongle, AFAIK, for both Zigbee and Z-Wave, nothing will be recognized fully automatically. You'll have to tell the Green that it should look for a new device, and then do something on the device, like pushing a button. The exception is if those devices are already connected to another controller (like Hue can be), or if they're connected to a dongle already and you plug the dongle into your Green. btw, if there's no Insteon involved in your future, and you don't otherwise plan to start using or keep using a UDI device, it might be time to take this to another forum - like HA's. I plan to keep using my Polisy with HA, so I'll be here for a while. -Tom

I just went through the Yellow experience, so I'll try to be helpful. Its big problem has been the unavailability of the RPi CM4 it requires. If you buy one with it already installed, that won't matter, but if you want to go Yellow, make sure you can find one with the memory features and price you're comfortable with. I myself way overpaid for a fully loaded CM4 from eBay. Once I got everything up and running, it found a lot of stuff automatically - Hubitat, Elk, Hue, and Sonos, and a whole bunch of PnP devices. It even found my Oral-B toothbrush. I can't remember if it found my Polisy automatically, but if not, I must have added it in seconds, because I don't remember struggling with it. It also automatically created a dashboard with everything in it. It's kind of disorganized, but I can exercise every device, and it's a good starting point. Since the initial setup I have added one Z-Wave and one Zigbee device, just to see what the experience was like. It was easy, but that's what it'll take to add things one at a time to HA. When you let it discover another controller it will bring multiple things in at once. Something to think about with regards to Hue. Speaking of which, I think I read the Green has no radios. It needs to be wired and is really meant to tie together other controllers and services. You can buy a dongle for it that will let you directly control Zigbee and Z-Wave. I'm also pretty sure you'd be able to move from Green to Yellow in the future if you wanted to, though I have not done that. That's assuming that if you bought the dongle, it also could be moved to Yellow. The other integrations should be very straightforward by comparison. I've probably spent $500 for my Yellow, all in. It has WiFi and Bluetooth and tons of memory, and I'm not using any of that. I'm sure I could get by just fine with a Green, but it wasn't available at the time. Finally, for $99, I don't see how you can go wrong. -Tom

Put another way, UDI has done a great job of abstracting the links database design of Insteon, which I think is the protocol's greatest strength. Drag 'n drop, set controller/responder, level, etc., and it's all very graphical. Insteon's protocol is what allows scenes to function in the absence of any separate controller, and completely avoids the popcorn effect. Programming on the ISY is good, but probably not better than other solutions. Support of other protocols like Z-Wave is OK, but they don't fit into the link-centric paradigm of the ISY, and UDI is too small to add them all natively, so you end up relying on nodeservers if you have a lot of different protocols. As I'm diversifying, I'm looking to HA to tie multiple protocols together, but I think I'll always use ISY to manage Insteon, no matter what the "uber" controller is. To me it's worth the extra expense over the PLM alone. I'm doing a similar thing with Hubitat and Lutron. Nobody manages Lutron better. -Tom

Thanks, but I'm not looking to do anything I can't do already; I'm just trying to contribute. Since you've used Insteon on an ISY, I think you know what I'm talking about. I have a switch at the top of my stairs that I can double-click off and it turns off all the lights downstairs. I set it up on the ISY, which was really easy to do, and since it created all the controller and responder links in the devices, it still works if the ISY is unreachable for whatever reason. I have a lot of Insteon devices in my home that do these sorts of things, and I've reused the scenes with multiple controller devices after creating them. Again, the ISY made setting this up easy. I'm not sure how one would set it all up with HA and Insteon with just the PLM. Maybe it's easy; I just don't know. I'm also not too surprised you found it easier to get your Z-Wave fob working in HA. I haven't found the ISY to be the best solution for Z-Wave, but for Insteon, I think it's unbeatable. -Tom

Do any of these allow you to easily set up scenes like the ISY can? That's what I can't figure out. If I want to make a double-click off on a switch turn off all the lights in a room, or in the house, can I easily set that up? I'm sure it can be done by programming, but in HA can I easily create a scene so all the lights change at once, and it works even if HA isn't responding? This is the part I don't understand. -Tom

Not an expert, but from what I can see HA expects you to use something (like the Insteon Hub) to manage links. There's nothing better at link management than ISY. Definitely worth the pain of Java, in my opinion. -Tom

I may be wrong, but it seems to me you're always going to get the best performance by defining the scenes on ISY and invoking them in HA. It probably greatly reduces the number of messages sent and received by both HA and the ISY. And even if you do get all the devices to respond individually when part of an HA scene, I imagine you'll still see some popcorn effect without using Insteon scenes. I get that it's more work and doesn't help much if you have a lot of lighting that uses protocols other than Insteon in your scenes, but the scene logic that's built into Insteon's protocol is pretty well thought out and robust. -Tom

Nobody supports Insteon better than UDI does, and I doubt anyone ever will. If Insteon is an important part of your home automation, you should have UDI’s most powerful and supportable product. This is a “‘not if but when” kind of thing. You can stick with the 994 until it breaks or won’t do something the Eisy can. -Tom

I’m currently using both - Alexa at home and Google in my remote job apartment. I agree with @bmercier. You can read about one of my Google frustrations in the Google forum. That forum only gets about one post a month on average, and not a lot of responses. Not stated in there is that I get relatively frequent (maybe 1 out of 10 or 20 times) responses of “Something went wrong. Try again in a few seconds”, or no response at all. -Tom

Revisiting in a rare moment of spare time. I currently have an Insteon open/close sensor on the entryway closet door triggering an Insteon Appliancelinc with nothing plugged into it, and its state triggers a Google Home routine that turns on/off the entryway light that is controlled by the SmartRent app via Z-Wave. It's working about as well as you'd expect - like dog poo. Has anyone found a good, cheap sensor for triggering open/close events for use in Google Home routines, or even better, found a way to trigger Google Home routines with Insteon sensors? -Tom

Last night I finished the training for RA3 and downloaded the Designer software. Sure enough, it still lacks sophisticated logic programming. -Tom

I can imagine an installer would typically propose this, if most or all of the gear in place is compatible with the RA3 processor. But you could probably also insist on the installer only adding new ClearConnect Type X devices (if any) to the RA3 processor. I'm not sure that would buy you anything, though, if you want to automate it all with a single solution. btw, I don't have any experience with the RA3 processor or the software to program on it, so everything I'm saying with any certainty pertains to RA2, its repeater, and Inclusive software. -Tom

Lutron's software offers few options for automation. They have timeclocks and vacation/holiday modes and motion sensors and garage opener controllers, but that's about it. That's why everybody controls it with another hub or software solution, or at least voice assistants, which increasingly have their own automation. -Tom

I'd bet that Home Assistant can also support multiple Lutron repeaters, just like Hubitat can. If so, you could support your existing RA2 (even beyond 200; that limit is for two (max) repeaters in the Lutron software) and add everything new as RA3. -Tom

I'm not a pro, but I do have a suggestion. If you want a good DIY solution for controlling your Lutron lighting, I can heartily recommend adding a Hubitat hub. It's only about $150, has no mandatory recurring fees, and can be 100% local after setup if you want. A couple of its developers have DIY Lutron RA2 lighting in their own houses, so they've added a lot of great functionality for it. And there's a nodeserver for Hubitat that will allow you to bring everything into ISY as nodes, so you can automate things the way you're used to. The Hubitat can also support multiple hubs and can therefore mix and match RA2 and Caseta devices. The only caveat is that Hubitat, like most smaller players, doesn't have access to the LEAP security in the new RA3 hub. Some others do, like Home Assistant, but I think it's based on a reverse-engineering of LEAP that could break at some point? Not sure. -Tom

I have a really old dimmer and a really old thermostat and neither work. Just letting you know you're not alone. I would bet most newer devices do work, but I don't own any. -Tom

My story is similar to Andy's. I'm living in a temporary "work away from home" apartment, so I'm limited in what i can do with the wiring. But since I was starting from scratch, and I'd heard such great things about Lutron, I thought I'd give it a try. It is indeed rock solid, and their support for LED bulb dimming even in their older dimmers is outstanding. Like Insteon, you need a logic engine to do anything sophisticated with it. I'd recommend the Hubitat if you want an ISY-like experience, or HA (which I'm just now starting to play around with) if you're a tinkerer. Or I suppose the Lutron NS on ISY, as long as you stick to Caseta. I have Caseta, and RA2, and QS standalone, and only Hubitat handles all these well, AFAIK. For anyone starting out and wanting to buy new and have the longest support life, you'll be choosing RA3, and unfortunately I think it's still true that there isn't any good DIY platform that has licensed access to their security, as opposed to a reverse engineered solution that could break in the future. But I admit I'm not up on the latest news. Holwever, the Lutron world doesn't have anything as cheap yet as versatile as the KPL. And it's really set up to do everything via scenes, and for buttons and motions to always invoke a scene that has actual physical lights in it, and the product lines lack many of the kinds of sensors that we've gotten used to in the Insteon and Z-Wave ecosystems. But for just responding to commands and controlling the power to the lights, it can't be beat. When I get back to my permanent home, I'm going to replace some of my Insteon with Lutron - probably just in the rooms most often occupied where I never want to have to repeat a command and the dimming performance is crucial. -Tom

And I think "droptrow", followed by "sitdown" should be run before "toiletpaper". -Tom

This is my observation, too. ElkRP blocks, but multiple simultaneous connections from other apps are possible. I've got the NS and HA connected atm. -Tom