Question on Insteon Motion Sensor Inputs

[hchain]

Several of my motion sensors (older models), versions 2.2 and 2.4, do not report a status (ON or OFF) for the Battery and/or Dusk inputs. It's just blank in the ISY console. The sensor input is always either ON or OFF. 

Why is that?

Regards,

[mwester]

In general, the ISY will display a blank status when it doesn't know the status of the device.  This happens at power-up of the ISY, of course -- and it quickly fixes that by running a query to find out the status of the devices (unless one has disabled that query-on-power-up option), so for most devices you will always see a status.

Battery-powered devices such as the motion sensors are different - they go to sleep, and won't respond to the ISY's query attempts (so the ISY won't even try to query them usually).  So for battery-powered devices, the status fields will often be blank, and will only be filled in when the device itself wakes up and informs the ISY about its status.

So, for the Dusk/Dawn sensor, you should be seeing that have a value within 24 hours of an ISY restart.  At least mine does.  For the battery devices, that'll be blank until the battery report comes in, again about 24 hours.

Are your motion sensors not behaving in this fashion, then?

[larryllix]

IIRC I read in a post back some time that the low battery status for MSes can be reset inside ISY by using a query line  inside a program. I have used it in my system and I believe it works.

Since MSes do not send  Low Batt = Off, ISY has to create the status.

[hchain]

Thank you both for responding.

ISY has been on for quite a while now.
All my motion sensors are in a row on my desk, so at the same distance from the ISY controller.
They all have new battery, same settings. I have reset most of them, trying to see if I could fix that behavior.

What I do not understand is why they are not showing the same info. They should all be blank or showing a status, but they don't (both Dusk and Battery, I have a quite a few combinations of Blank/ON/OFF)...

I guess I will live with it since the sensors themselves are working 

Is the newer generation better, I mean, are they worth replacing, aside from the fact they can be powered through USB?

RV