Scenes vs Direct Program Control

[vbPhil]

I recently re managed my ISY 994i configuration to using more scenes for light control.

 

For instance, where I had a program called "Dusk Control" I would command each light individually to set it's on level. This was working fine and was quite reliable.

 

The change I made was to create a scene called "Dusk" and it contained all the necessary lights with their ramp rate and dim values set. Then in my "Dusk Control" program I had one statement to turn the scene On. This is very slick and I like the approach. I now have a group of lights called Dusk and they can be controlled as a group from a variety of program conditions and controllers.

 

However, now I seem to be having intermittent problems where a light, in a scene, doesn't command on or off as it should but yet it's value in ISY is correct. As a work around I would issue the scene command a couple times separated with a 5 second wait statement.

 

Seems like using scenes has made my system less reliable.

 

So, my basic question here is; would the nature of the Insteon communication protocol make an Insteon Network more prone to communication misses when using scene commands versus direct commands?

 

thanks,  -phil

[LeeG]

Scenes and Direct control should work equally well with a good Insteon network, although Scenes have functional capabilities that cannot be achieved with Direct commands.

 

A Scene can be less reliable in a marginal or poor Insteon network as appears to be happening  in your situation.  Likely the Direct commands had to be issued more than once internally (command retry) which does not happen with an ISY Scene from a PLM.  The devices that are intermittent with a Scene should be analyzed for sources of noise or signal absorption on the circuit, type of load (CFLs for example), etc.

[vbPhil]

Thanks LeeG, just the response I was looking for. I wasn't aware that a direct command would be retried internally and a scene command from the PLM would not be. Surely that is what's happening in my system.

 

The modules I'm having difficulty with in scenes are older SmartHome units that are not dual-band. My plan is to replace those with newer dual band units as Smarthome offers discounts.

 

Thanks,  -phil