Insteon and new house construction - which way to go????

[mwester]

Insteon/Smarthome is pretty much stalled right now, and what little motion they have is in the cloud direction.  It would actually be better for us avid and enthusiastic hobbyists if they did go out of business, so that as you say, someone will buy up the technology rights.  (Although power-line signaling is a technology whose golden era is gone, lost with the rise of the energy-efficient switching power supply... you'll need as many Insteon FilterLincs as you have Insteon devices if you choose that direction.)

But. the legal issues and other possible concerns may well make the purchase of the technology rights a lot harder than we would think, and in the interim as others on this thread have noted, we'll have PLMs dying of old age.

Now, someone will undoubtedly step up and offer repair services.  Heck, I might do that myself -- for users who have a solid couple-grand investment in Insteon devices in their walls, I suspect I could easily charge $250 for a PLM repair and get away with it!  What's the other choice those users have -- tear 40 or 50 Insteon switches out of their walls???  No choice but to pay whatever the cost might be!

Oh yeah -- I forgot!  The other choice is to forgo doomed single-vendor technology and select something like Z-Wave when building out the house in the FIRST PLACE!   Don't fall for the "selecting one z-wave switch provider for consistent look-and-feel is exactly the same as the one-vendor Insteon" argument -- that's comparing apples and oranges!  The issue is that when (and it is WHEN, not IF) Insteon/Smarthome goes belly-up, you'll have NO recourse other than hoping and praying that somebody will buy the technology rights, and offer some support, before your PLM fails and you have to pay a thief like me $250 or more to get yours fixed.  If your z-wave wall switch fails, you buy another brand.  If your z-wave dongle fails, you buy another controller.  Can't do that once Insteon dies.

[apostolakisl]

44 minutes ago, mwester said:

Oh yeah -- I forgot!  The other choice is to forgo doomed single-vendor technology and select something like Z-Wave when building out the house in the FIRST PLACE!   Don't fall for the "selecting one z-wave switch provider for consistent look-and-feel is exactly the same as the one-vendor Insteon" argument -- that's comparing apples and oranges!  The issue is that when (and it is WHEN, not IF) Insteon/Smarthome goes belly-up, you'll have NO recourse other than hoping and praying that somebody will buy the technology rights, and offer some support, before your PLM fails and you have to pay a thief like me $250 or more to get yours fixed.  If your z-wave wall switch fails, you buy another brand.  If your z-wave dongle fails, you buy another controller.  Can't do that once Insteon dies.

Aside from the PLM, anyone with an ISY can just starting replacing their insteon devices with zwave devices (one at a time).  Really not any different than replacing one z-wave device with one from a different z-wave vendor.  Assuming of course UDI doesn't go belly up and your ISY dies.  But the fact is, 100% chance that every company in existence today will go belly up some day.  Try going back to 1991 when I graduated from college and half my friends went to work for Arthur Anderson and tell them that they would be out on the street in 10 years!  Or conversely, go back to 1997 and try to tell someone that in 15 years Apple would be the largest company in the world as it teetered on the brink of insolvency.  As it turns out, while half of my friends went to work for Arthur Anderson, one of them went to work for Apple (not immediately out of college).  While none of my buddies are the ones the killed AA, turns out, my friend who went to Apple is the one who saved them.  Anyway, point is, trying to predict whose going bankrupt and who is thriving isn't all that easy.

[Tuckerdude]

Hey everybody,

I'm really happy to see this topic spark some good old-fashioned debate and getting lots of points of view! While difficult/impossible to know where all these companies and products will ultimately wind up, I DO think there are a few things which will remain constant for years to come. #1 is that houses will be wired for electricity the same way that they are today and for the rest of my lifetime. So I feel somewhat future-proofed as long as I stick to traditional building methods. #2 is that by keeping an ISY at the heard of my system, I can easily pivot back and forth between technologies without too much worry. That, plus snake-ing lots and lots of ethernet cable all through the house and surrounding property to ensure I can hook up IP controllable devices, cameras, and sensors.

As a side note....today I met with my builder and his "electrical" guy to discuss the high-level plan for the new house. I found it quite funny to be talking to a guy who has 20+ years of experience, handing him an Insteon Dimmer switch, and seeing a confused expression on his face. Clearly, he's never seen these things before. He told me he has done builds that were built around systems like Crestron, but he'd never seen these before.

[mwester]

Oh - I should add that in addition to snaking lots and lots of ethernet cable, you should also put in lots and lots of empty conduits.  Do it inside the house, and inside the other buildings, as well as between all the buildings.

 

I put a 2" conduit from house to the shed/shop about 250' away, along with a cat-5 direct burial, the 100A service lines, a 12ga landscape lighting cable, and a 7-conductor heavy-gauge underground sprinkler wire.  I had no defined purpose for the conduit, the landscape cable, nor the sprinkler wire -- but while the trench was open for the 100A service line, why not future-proof?

I put an entire 12" x 12" chase from basement up through two floors to the attic when we built the house -- there's several unplanned conduits in there already, along with a de-humidifier drain line.  As it turns out, we encountered troubles with some wires and flexible drain lines getting crushed by the expanding foam insulation -- having that chase saved me from tearing out drywall and insulation in a brand-new house!

[Tuckerdude]

Hey mwester...

All great stuff! Yeah, I discussed this very thing with the builder today. By design, there will be a pretty large sub-floor to attic chase that I will use to run 2-3 inch conduit...about 5 of them. Some of them will be used to carry the ethernet cables at the time of construction. But the others will be empty, for future expansion.

BTW...how did you find pulling cables from 250' away? I ask because I will be in the same boat, as the distance between the main-house, and the stables/tackroom is about 325'. I've pulled cables myself through long distances, but usually through 1 inch conduits. I will OF COURSE use much larger ones for this project, so I imagine the pulls are a bit easier in that scenario.

[mwester]

I had some advice from the electrician -- in a nutshell, it's a two-person job.  I used a shop-vac to suck a ball with a thin rope (parachute cord) through first, then attached the rope to the wire to be pulled.  I taped up the connection with blue painters tape to build up portions of the connection so that it was basically just a small gradual lump in the rope/cable and couldn't snag on anything -- then wrapped that with electrical tape.  The electrician suggested lubricant gel -- I was able to get that at the local building supply big-box store (never knew such a thing existed, and it's mess stuff -- but it helps!).  Finally, the spool of wire I pulled was mounted on a dowel directly above the conduit end in the basement, the wife monitored that end and helped ensure that the wire spooled evenly into the conduit, whilst I did the hauling on the other end.  We had to to pull it back and forth a couple of times to get the connection (lump) around one of the tighter turns, but overall it was pretty easy.

That said, the electrician had an absolutely miserable time hauling one of the feed lines from the meter through the conduit under the basement floor to the panel -- apparently they missed one of the two conduits which should have been put in place before any concrete was poured.  So the second conduit (we have dual meters and panels, to handle different billing rates for the geothermal unit) was dug in and snuck under the footings -- involving a tighter turn than they wanted.  To get to the point, the electrician couldn't get that relatively short (< 50') run through the conduit himself... the framing crew (3 strong guys) helping him couldn't do it, and in the end, they had to use the hydraulics on a back-hoe to pull the last 25' of that cable into place.

I lived on the property (we borrowed an RV for a year) while the house was being built -- and it's a good thing too.  Even with a solid general contractor, the number of issues that I caught before they became expensive problems was worth the pain and hassle of living like you're camping for most of a year.

One final thing: a couple times each week, I went over the building site, and photographed things.  One weekend, just before the drywall went up, the wife and I photographed the walls and everything in them (I held a tape measure up to the walls as we did this to help as a reference later on).  That library of photos has been invaluable, from being able to find issues (like a leaking shower drain line) to simply knowing where it's safe to drill a hole for mounting something on the wall, as well as documenting the general location of the various geothermal pipes (we did the horizontal layout, so one can't just dig a hole anywhere one would like here anymore...)

In the end, I'm pretty happy with it all.  The only major thing that happened that we can't make right is that we lost a very large evergreen in the yard.  My fault.  I should have known to water it aggressively.  It was a very dry summer, and with all the machinery around, I suspect at least some of its root system was compromised as well.  The junk trees all survived just fine, of course -- it was just the 50+ year old evergreen that we wanted to keep that perished!

[lilyoyo1]

2 hours ago, ELA said:

That I have not heard before. Can you please explain how it clears noise off the line.

I'm not sure if they still make it. Pretty much it bridges your phases and cleans frequencies around the insteon frequency

[Scottmichaelj]

One final thing: a couple times each week, I went over the building site, and photographed things.  One weekend, just before the drywall went up, the wife and I photographed the walls and everything in them (I held a tape measure up to the walls as we did this to help as a reference later on).  That library of photos has been invaluable, from being able to find issues (like a leaking shower drain line) to simply knowing where it's safe to drill a hole for mounting something on the wall, as well as documenting the general location of the various geothermal pipes

I can’t echo this enough. If you plan on being in the home for a while, as@mwester said best, this will be invaluable.

[apostolakisl]

I also put conduits in all over the place.  There are people who tell you should put in "structured cabling" which basically means put in a gazillion wires so you are covered no matter what.  I totally disagree with that.  99% of that wire will go unused and/or become obsolete.  I had the electricians use double gang boxes with a low voltage/high voltage divider in the middle in many locations.  I then ran 3/4 conduit from the low voltage side to the nearest attic space.  3/4 conduit is quite a bit cheaper than structured wiring so in those locations that you don't end up needing anything, you don't waste all that money.  More importantly, you get to put in exactly the wire/fiber you want and change it out whenever it becomes obsolete.  You can use the smurf tube instead of conduit, but the smooth interior of conduit is easier to pull wire through.  It is also cheaper and becomes very flexible if you warm it up a bit with a propane torch.

And yes, take lots of pictures.  I though I took pictures of everything, but, of course, I missed that one spot I really needed.  So I would do both video and still photos and literally get every square foot of wall and ceiling.

And if you are pulling heavy wires through 250' of conduit, you will very likely need powered pulling.  My electricians did and they were only pulling through 125'.  The electrician had a purpose built tool for that.  But, if you can hitch up to your bumper, go for it.  Just make sure do a damn good job splicing your puller cable to your wire.

[Tuckerdude]

Morning everyone....

I am totally on the same page with regard to taking pictures/video, etc. I'm also planning to do a complete home-build timelapse which I know will be both entertaining, and informative. Fortunately, there are some VERY tall trees nearby that will be the perfect (temporary) mounting spot for a couple of cameras pointing straight at the build-site. I've already put temporary power and ethernet in the small "stable house" where I've had a PC recording the feeds from 5 cameras. So before construction starts, I will mount a couple more on these tress about 40 feet up, and set them to record time-lapse during construction days.

Apostolakisl...I am with you on the conduit! The first thing this electrician suggested to me was structure wiring! I shot that down real-quick! Since the majority of what I plan to do requires ethernet, I will likely go overkill on that front. But some of the other "multi-cable" options include things that are either too old-school, or just not something I will ever use.

 

[apostolakisl]

5 hours ago, Tuckerdude said:

Morning everyone....

I am totally on the same page with regard to taking pictures/video, etc. I'm also planning to do a complete home-build timelapse which I know will be both entertaining, and informative. Fortunately, there are some VERY tall trees nearby that will be the perfect (temporary) mounting spot for a couple of cameras pointing straight at the build-site. I've already put temporary power and ethernet in the small "stable house" where I've had a PC recording the feeds from 5 cameras. So before construction starts, I will mount a couple more on these tress about 40 feet up, and set them to record time-lapse during construction days.

Apostolakisl...I am with you on the conduit! The first thing this electrician suggested to me was structure wiring! I shot that down real-quick! Since the majority of what I plan to do requires ethernet, I will likely go overkill on that front. But some of the other "multi-cable" options include things that are either too old-school, or just not something I will ever use.

 

Conduit is about 25 cents per foot and you only need enough to get to the nearest attic space.  Structured cable is going to be a couple dollars a foot (depending) and will include fiber, coax, and cat6 and maybe some other stuff and/or multiples of those.  And, it will all be home runned, so many many feet of it.  You will save many thousands of dollars just running what you need and knowing that as your needs change you can easily pull new cable through the conduit.  As it turns out for me, I have only ever needed my cat5/6, but was surprised that at some locations I needed multiples.  With PoE, you really don't need much else.  Speaker wire I did not do this way as I don't figure that this technology is going to change much.  Sure, they have bluetooth speakers and the like, but I'm pretty sure the best speakers will keep using regular wire for as long as I'm on this planet.  Good chance my currently installed speakers will be with me till I die.  Although, I did just about blow up my subwoofer watching the youtube video of the Falcon Heavy that was put up by a guy called "sound travelers".  He recorded it with really high end audio equipment and man alive did it rumble.  I actually smelled some nastiness coming out of my subwoofer, but so far it still works.

[MWareman]

I sort of get the din rail thing, but personally, I don't think I would do it.  First off, once wired this way, the house is pretty much forever wired this way.  It can not easily be wired conventionally.  You would still need Insteon switches/kpls at all of the control locations.  More or less, you would have din rail Insteon device for each fixture that would be the thing actually controlling the fixture.  Then, at each control location (ie like next to the door to a room) you would need another Insteon device that is linked to the din rail device as a scene member to tell the din rail device what to do.  In conventional wiring, that same device at the door to the room, would also actually control the device.  Essentially, you have all the same devices located around the house, plus, for each fixture, an additional din rail device.  Plus, you have a lot more wiring with all those extra home runs.  I don't know, just don't see how it is better.  I should add that it does offer you the option to install some of the super high-end systems like Crestron which require home runs.  But I think Crestron and the like have numbered days.  They charge waaaaaaaaaaay more money and the "consumer" grade stuff just keeps getting better and better, and is already better in a number of ways.  Especially that you don't need to pay a technician $200 every time something doesn't go just quite perfect.

The DIN rail was an example of how the Insteon or zwave controls devices could be centralized, useful in a large property where range and noise may otherwise be an issue. This is perfectly to code (if installed correctly) and commonly used, though less so in residential situations. A fully ‘home run’ system can easily be converted to behave as a conventional one simply by hard connecting the switches to the lighting at the central location. You would have two DIN rails, one for each power phase.

And no, you wouldn’t need Insteon devices at the switches. Standard switches can easily drive the sense input on DIN rail Insteon dimmers.

The only real downside is greater expense at install time, because there is (as you say) a lot more wire involved. Personally, I feel the flexibility it affords and the increased reliability of having all sensitive components in one location - if starting from a blueprint that is. It’s far from feasible to retrofit.

[MWareman]

I think the home run looks are cool but would never do it nor buy a house designed that way. Besides being too "custom" and the limitations inherent in the design my biggest gripe is what do you do if something should go wrong. If my insteon keypad or any of my light switches in any given room goes bad, I still have other switches to turn on a light. If your controller goes bad, you're stuck in many ways.

Personally, I consider a home run electrical system is a good selling point. But then I’m strange that way....

Either way, it’s not a single controller I’m advocating. It’s still a separate dimmer component for each light, each controlled from one or more discrete switches. All wired back to a central location where the multiple dimmers are concentrated. The dimmers could be eliminated and the switches hardwired to lights if desired to form a conventional switch/light wiring. A DIN rail simply gives a space efficient way of wiring many dimmers in one place without creating a rats nest of wiring.

Failure of a single dimmer only affects that light - not others.

Is feels custom because it’s not common in homes in the U.S. However, it is a well established practice in certain areas, and is of particular benefit where lighting automation is desired in larger facilities (as is common in larger buildings, like government, industrial, schools etc...) where it is almost universally employed due to the issues of networking devices over larger distances especially in electrically noisy environments.

[lilyoyo1]

13 minutes ago, MWareman said:

 

Personally, I consider a home run electrical system is a good selling point. But then I’m strange that way....

Either way, it’s not a single controller I’m advocating. It’s still a separate dimmer component for each light, each controlled from one or more discrete switches. All wired back to a central location where the multiple dimmers are concentrated. The dimmers could be eliminated and the switches hardwired to lights if desired to form a conventional switch/light wiring. A DIN rail simply gives a space efficient way of wiring many dimmers in one place without creating a rats nest of wiring.

Failure of a single dimmer only affects that light - not others.

Is feels custom because it’s not common in homes in the U.S. However, it is a well established practice in certain areas, and is of particular benefit where lighting automation is desired in larger facilities (as is common in larger buildings, like government, industrial, schools etc...) where it is almost universally employed due to the issues of networking devices over larger distances especially in electrically noisy environments.

 

Regardless of how it's wired and steps someone takes, it's still very different from what other are accustomed to that it could make selling hard. The systems I've come across in homes generally have a single keypad on the wall to control  the various lights in the room. It looked really sharp and clean. To each their own though. I've just seen enough problems with them that I wouldn't want  it in my home. 

[zerreissen]

Interesting conversations here... I chose Insteon primarily because I feel like they have the best switches; they look and feel professional. Most of the Z-Wave options I've looked at look and feel cheap in comparison. Insteon was also one of the few with black as an option (I love the contrast it provides with our brushed nickel face plates). I've been slowly converting all of the (useful) switches in our house over to Insteon, and I'm about 3/4 of the way there. Unfortunately recently Insteon chose to discontinue black as an option, and now I'm stuck mixing white with black. I really wish they'd at least kept the option for the black replacement paddles.

So far (knock on wood) I haven't had a single Insteon device fail over the last 3 years, and communication to devices has been flawless, which I was a bit surprised about considering some of the odd wiring we have in our house.

[Tuckerdude]

Hi Zerreissen...

Nice picture! I didn't know they have discontinued the black versions...but can you NOT just pull the switch and plate covers if/when you ever have to replace the switches? I'm pretty sure you can, as I remember doing this for a couple of mine.

While on this subject, I am also struggling with whether or not to pull my switches from my current house and put them in the new house. As mentioned, I've never really had much in the way of failing switches and even have some from my original house from almost 10 years ago. So I need to decide whether I just pull them and put back normal switches, or leave them in and try to sell the "smarthome" concept whenever the time comes. I don't really know, but I feel like MOST people don't recognize the value of these things when coming into to buy a home. Anyway, I've got a lot of time to think about it as the build process for the new house will be Looooooooooooooooooooooooooong!!!!! ?

[lilyoyo1]

I wouldn't bring them to the new house especially if they are really old. The technology has changed enough that I think it's worthwhile. Besides, in the grand scheme of things, the overall cost is minor. 

Depending on age, I would pull the old ones out to avoid future hassles from the homeowner. While you haven't had issues yet, being electronic devices, failure is a matter of when rather if. 

Many people don't want to pay more though I think that is slowly changing with Smarthomes becoming all the rage. Even if it doesn't make you more money, it can deal the deal. When I sold my first house back in 2010, it was in a down market. The switches appealed to the husband and made them choose my home over the other they were looking at. 

[larryllix]

I agree with lilyoyo1 about removing the HA units. Times have changed somewhat and depending on the price of the home it may bring the price of your home down with people refusing to jump into something that will cost them an electrician bill to remove them all.
I mean.....
........"who knows what other self-styled mess of the wiring you might have done?"
......"Who is going to fix that complex monster if something goes wrong?"

I sold a home back about mid 90s full of X10 wall switches. Thinking I was pulling a fast one, I replaced the X10 devices with similar looking hardware switches before the final transaction. On the final inspection the new owner wife ran right to the hall switch and asked "What happened to the weird switch that was here?".  In a corner, I explained it was part of a custom security system...BS...blah...blah!
She came back with, "Good! We thought we were going to have to pay for an electrician to take them all out!"

Today it is a hard decison and the best person to ask would be a real estate person how they feel, based on their experiences with homes at your level and neighbourhood.

[apostolakisl]

On 12/16/2018 at 11:55 AM, Tuckerdude said:

Hi Zerreissen...

Nice picture! I didn't know they have discontinued the black versions...but can you NOT just pull the switch and plate covers if/when you ever have to replace the switches? I'm pretty sure you can, as I remember doing this for a couple of mine.

While on this subject, I am also struggling with whether or not to pull my switches from my current house and put them in the new house. As mentioned, I've never really had much in the way of failing switches and even have some from my original house from almost 10 years ago. So I need to decide whether I just pull them and put back normal switches, or leave them in and try to sell the "smarthome" concept whenever the time comes. I don't really know, but I feel like MOST people don't recognize the value of these things when coming into to buy a home. Anyway, I've got a lot of time to think about it as the build process for the new house will be Looooooooooooooooooooooooooong!!!!! ?

I would remove the Insteon switches because the hassle of removing them is less than the post-sale support the new owner is likely to hound you with.  Then, I would install them in the new house if they are at least new enough to be dual band.  Anything older than that I would retire.  

The colored paddles are sold separately from the switch.  So he would have already swapped out with the white.  I'm sure his concern is that he is still adding more Insteon switches and has only the black paddles on hand.