Opinions sought....

[MarkJames]

As I'm sure many of you do I use my ISY and Insteon to save energy costs.  To that end I have routines that turn off lights that I consider 'unnecessary' during the daylight hours.  Things like garden lighting, bathroom lights, well lit rooms, seldom used parts of the house etc.  Every so often during the day I have a routine that turns these all off.  Granted, it can be annoying sometimes but overall I think it's worth it.

 

I've done this, traditionally, by having a scene called 'Unnecessary daytime lights' and have all the devices and triggers in it as responders.  Every 15 minutes or so during daylight I send an OFF to the scene and they all shut off.  This works fine but it's a big bloody scene now with a ton of members.  I have somewhere between 150-200 insteon devices so when I make changes to large scenes it can be a slow process.  It also - and correct me if I'm wrong here - chews up PLM space.  I maxed out my previous PLM and it took some time to figure out just why things had gotten very strange.

 

Anyways - the alternative method would be to just run a program that shuts lights off in a sequence - so instead of

 

set insteon scene 'unnecessary daytime lights' OFF

 

I could replace it with a program that goes

 

set insteon scene 'garden lights' OFF
set insteon scene 'bathroom lights' OFF

set insteon scene 'attic light' OFF

.

.

.

etc

 

The former causes an instantaneous off of all lights and is pretty neat.  The latter is slower as each step happens but is easier to change and doesn't require all devices to be part of a scene.  Also the latter requires the ISY to be running while the former doesn't (not an issue for me but who knows what will happen when I sell the house)

 

Any thoughts from the perspective of the ISY internals?

 

mark

[apnar]

I'd think a middle ground approach might be a good balance.  If you could split your list into 5-10 scenes that each contain a logical grouping of lights (which ideally you could double use for some other programs) that would cut your update times down but still not have a crazy long program to maintain either.

 

As to the benefit of requiring the ISY or not, without the ISY what are you having setting the scene every 15 minutes? 

[MarkJames]

I'd think a middle ground approach might be a good balance.  If you could split your list into 5-10 scenes that each contain a logical grouping of lights (which ideally you could double use for some other programs) that would cut your update times down but still not have a crazy long program to maintain either.

 

As to the benefit of requiring the ISY or not, without the ISY what are you having setting the scene every 15 minutes? 

 

They're already grouped that way for the most part so that approach makes sense.  

 

As for the question about what runs the scene every 15 minutes?  I guess that was a brain **** on my part lol.  Good point!  I suppose I was thinking along the lines of having a KPL button that turns them all off - I have those around the house that turn everything off for convenience.

 

mark

[paulbates]

Mark

 

I have a couple of big scenes that turn many lights on and off, as well as a few smaller ones in groups as you describe. I don't add devices often enough that the time it takes to wait to add to the big scene really matter. I also have some smaller groups to control specific things, eg, 1 scene to turn on 4 outletlincs associated with yard and holiday lights. I also have a number of lights and keypad keys connected to a "Goodnight" scene. That's handy, and spouse approved! I keep the big scenes as I prefer to push as much work as practical to the Insteon network, and prefer to see all outside lights and lamps go on and off together. 

 

If you want to know where you are with number of links, run Tools/Diagnotics/Show PLM links table. Click Start, let it run till it quits scrolling. You can hit the count button to get the link count to compare (Its one more than the number of links on the list because the list starts with 0). I think the published link count for the 2314PLM  is 1000 links possible, probably 800 is a reasonable operational high water mark. 

 

Paul

 

 

 

 

 

 

[lilyoyo1]

I break my all off/away scenes down into zones. The devices are in each scene as responders you have yours set. I start with everything within visual range first to cut off simply for instant gratification and out of visual range devices (zones) goes off subsequently. This way I have the appearance of instant shutoff without dealing with the possibilities of missed signals from extremely large scenes. I like this manner as well since it allows someone else who may want different to come in and easily redo my setup.

[lilyoyo1]

When you put a kpl in a scene as a controller you will eat up the largestamount of links which is another reason I do all responders and simply let the kpl trigger be done via the ISY. While it does make my system dependent on the ISY, the likelihood of a failure is small and off it happens, my lights simply stay on for a day. Sucks but not the end of the world

[stusviews]

When you put a kpl in a scene as a controller you will eat up the largestamount of links which is another reason I do all responders and simply let the kpl trigger be done via the ISY. While it does make my system dependent on the ISY, the likelihood of a failure is small and off it happens, my lights simply stay on for a day. Sucks but not the end of the world

 

 If using a program causes as little as a one second delay and you turn on lights in the kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom and bathroom on the average of twice a day, over the course of a year you will have waited more than an hour for the lights to turn on. Even more if you use the bathroom a lot

[MarkJames]

 If using a program causes as little as a one second delay and you turn on lights in the kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom and bathroom on the average of twice a day, over the course of a year you will have waited more than an hour for the lights to turn on. Even more if you use the bathroom a lot

 

An hour a year!

 

Sounds like something else for us older, married guys than bathroom time

[MarkJames]

When you put a kpl in a scene as a controller you will eat up the largestamount of links which is another reason I do all responders and simply let the kpl trigger be done via the ISY. While it does make my system dependent on the ISY, the likelihood of a failure is small and off it happens, my lights simply stay on for a day. Sucks but not the end of the world

 

In recent years I've set up a few programs and variables so that things don't ever get stuck 'on' for a day.

 

I have a motion sensor that I put facing out one of my windows.  I don't use it for motion sensing - just for dusk to dawn sensing.  It sets a variable indicating if it's dark or not.  My old JDS Stargate used to just use your lat/long to determine sunrise/sunset and you could base things on whether it was dark or not.  I miss that functionality.  I was getting it back by setting variables in the ISY from the ISY interface to Homeseer but the motion sensor is easy and it works well so I've switched to that.  I really miss having full calendar conditions in ISY - I've been hoping for that feature for 10 years now but it doesn't seem to be on the list.  I've tried some of the calendar type programs in ISY but I find them way too kludgy to be of any real use.  

 

When many of my scenes get turned on by a controller, rather than by sensor or by some other condition or schedule, I set a variable that indicates that the light *should* be on or *should* be off.  Just a simple 'garage_light_should_be_on' = 0 or 1 for instance. These variables time out depending on the location and whether it's dark out or not.  Every 5 minutes a program runs that turns off scenes based on time of day, occupancy, etc.  With these variables set I can leave lights etc. alone.  

 

I had to switch to these variables to avoid turning lights off right after someone had just finished turning them on.  Or lights that *should* be on at night but then also get tripped by a motion sensor or door contact on a timer which turns them off after 5 minutes even though they were 'meant' to be on (if this makes sense). Or things that are normally on a timer but sometimes you don't *want* them to be on a timer but you *do* want them to go back on the timer after you're finished doing what you're doing.  I found these problems infuriating.  Many of my lights that are timed or cycled allow you to bypass that cycling by simply fast-on'ing them.  The cycle/timed bypass will expire after a few hours or when you fast-off them.  I started doing this a few years ago when I had to do some work in my attic.  My kids would sometimes hit the attic light switch instead of the hall light switch so I had a routine that turned off the attic light every 5 minutes.  Problem was that I had work to do in the attic and I kept getting plunged into darkness.  This is what I came up with and it's gotten more and more elaborate over the years till it fits our lifestyle reasonably well now.

 

The hardest part of automating for me has been having the automation system not make things worse and also not having to live your life according to the rules of the home automation controller!  

 

Anyways - I've been reconfiguring a lot in the last few days to avoid too many links.  I used to have a scene that turned everything in the house off.  It was just one big-assed scene with about a half dozen KPL buttons that controlled it and then a bunch more that triggered it through a fast-on or fast-off via program.  But with a  hundred or so devices and 40+ KPL 6's or 8's involved many of my devices held upwards of 100 links - it became quite unwieldy.  You were definitely NOT getting a fully successful scene test out of that scene.  It would also take the better part of an hour to do a restore on some of the controllers that held this scene.

 

The reconfiguration has scenes that are just logical areas (kitchen, laundry, all of one floor, etc.).  ALL ON/OFF is generally a KPL press that immediately turns on/off the local scene by direct link and also triggers an ISY program to turn off the other scenes desired.  There's a lag but it's not that bad.  Having come from X-10 this is pretty darned good.

Edited May 28, 2016 by MarkJames