Insteon Hidden Door Sensor won't link - Disable Thermostats

[Bendrix]

At the current revision, the hidden door sensor has to be added manually as a Trigger Link, and when done, it works fine. But no matter what I tried, mine would not link up. The first one I ordered from Smarthome earned an RMA after the Smarthome tech and I concluded that it was a bad unit. The second unit arrived and the problem was identical so I started working with UDI tech support. We tried all the standard things to no avail. Yes, the software (firm and UI) are both at current beta levels.

 

The error was Unable to determine Insteon engine...

 

Resets, reboots, nothing would get that sensor to link.

 

I have water sensors and key pads that use IR, as well as quite a number of dual band switches and two repeaters, so signal integrity was not the question.

 

The problem turned out to be the Insteon Thermostats. I have 5 of them and they were all sending out humidity sensor updates every few seconds. It appears to be random, with some units doing it more often than others. The problem is that those updates from the TStat take priority over the linking operation. AND, because the hidden door sensor is sort of a [censored] product until UDI releases a device model for it, that sensor takes longer than usual to link.

 

Finally, Steve, on a SUNDAY (my tech hero), after much back and forth emailing during the weekend, got on my system remotely and looked at the activity log during the linking process. He saw all those humidity broadcasts and figured out that they were clogging the system. He disabled the thermostats and then tried relinking and that was the solution. The hidden door sensor linked as a Trigger link and now I'm using it.

 

I've been trying to track down a way to shut off those humidity broadcasts. The best I can find in the manual is on page 14 of 28, explaining the programming of the thermostat. There is a group EF which controls the broadcast of changes at the thermostat. A footnote indicates that these setting can only be changed via software, so you cannot adjust that using buttons on the unit.

 

This sounds to me like a job for UDI. More control is needed in the UDI screen for these thermostats to allow users to either slow down or eliminate updates (I don't use the humidity reading for anything). Especially if this is going to choke the UDI software UI, then it would be worth some work.

 

There may be another alternative and that is to program the humidity setpoints to extreme levels that will not be reached. Perhaps that will keep it from broadcasting, but I suspect it will not as the heat changes broadcast even when not near the setpoint.

 

The only solution is going to be to access that update rate in software.

[Brian H]

If you have the one built on the T1700 model.

They where known for constant humidity messages and there was a fix.

Look at this thread. Most pertinent is page 3 were the photo of the capacitor pads you solder across is shown.

viewtopic.php?f=28&t=3513