New house, more choices.

[Ajax]

OK I just spend the day reading and I am more confused than when I started. My last house was completely Insteon/Isy and I loved it. My parents are building a very large vacation home and asked me what they should install.

I would prefer Insteon/Isy again bc I know and like it. But with all the z-wave and wireless switches I am just not so sure. I love the fact that I can the keypads etc from Insteon. I am mad bc last night I went on Menards website and they were selling Insteon dimmers for $19! Tried buying 200 but only 1 left in all of the USA for Menards since the discontinued it... So no real good sale that I can find at this moment.

I know the arguments for z-wave over insteon protocol etc, but not sure what is the future, which I know is the million dollar question and everyone wish they knew...

If you guys have time and are not too annoyed at this moment since this question comes up every week. Which direction would you go? This is for my parents so no need for voice control or anything like that. If you recommend something besides insteon do you mind providing names not just protocols of what you would use. My main wishes are:

1. Whole house control-Basically all off function.

2. Remote sensor monitoring (vacation home- water leaks etc BAD)

3. Option to change light control for different lights or scenes 

4. Dimmers for LED.

5. Reliable, if wireless stops dont want then to call saying nothing is working.

 

Thanks in advance

Edited February 23, 2019 by Ajax

[larryllix]

I would go mostly Insteon again. Note: I have no Zwave at all. Battery operated devices I am still 60/40% for installing Insteon Zwave. Insteon because I haven't broken the Zwave hump yet, but Zwave because Insteon battery devices work poorly and are poorer quality. I have no Zwave experience except what I have read mostly here.
OTOH: I am hearing Zwave MS to Insteon Lighting is not quite fast enough. Nothing beats Insteon direct connections (Scenes) for MS to Light response speeds.

For my parents I would install a few Alexa or Google Home boxes and each week when I visited I would train them in a new technique. Show them how you can stop in the middle of a movie and ask Alexa how old Clint Eastwood is...or who played the lead role in Batman 1989?  Everybody loves it.
f you intend to do any colour LED strips (I would), the vocals are invaluable instead of trying to create switches with 8-10 different colours. For a small subscription fee (ISY Portal) you can integrate vocal devices with the HA. No other third party boxes or anything. So easy. I changed all my RGBWW lighting over to direct WiFi, eliminating most Hubs. All except Hue and MiLights, already having the bulbs and hubs. Avoid that complexity.

I would repeat my same MS to lighting. Mind you this could be done with plain old in wall occupancy switches too. That is the best HA in  it's simplest form.

Confused even more?

[lilyoyo1]

I concur with Larryllix in regards to insteon for lighting. Besides familiarity which will help you in the long run, I'm not a fan of the popcorn effect that zwave has when turning on multiple devices. That coupled with the fact that you have to be concerned with different variations of switches from the mfg. (Even from the same one). The ease of use with insteon is much better.

With that said, I do use zwave locks and sensors. I prefer their sensors over insteon's. To build out my mesh network, I've installed a bunch of zwave outlets throughout the house. While the range isn't as good as wall worts and it takes using more of them; I didn't want to be concerned with someone unplugging something and the ugliness that comes with wall worts. 

Zwave to insteon (as it would be the other way around) is slower. However my motion sensors only turn devices off so the delay is not noticed. In cases where they do turn on lights, it's used in area that you walk towards anyway so it's imperceptible as well. I do have a few of the motion sensor ll's. I have not had any trouble out of those so I can't complain. 

[mitchmitchell]

I think the question of Z-Wave vs. Insteon becomes moot with the dual band Insteon devices -- that's all we have now, powerline only is gone.  The Insteon wireless network does not come with the management headaches of a Z-Wave network.  We have Z-Wave locks and some other small devices but I would go with Insteon dual band over again if we ever moved.

[mitchmitchell]

Z-Wave motion sensor to Insteon lighting is slow because a round trip to the Z-Wave controller (ISY) is needed to send out a scene command -- Insteon goes directly. 

[asbril]

I know that many are very satisfied with Insteon and that is great. However I would not want you to discard the Zwave alternative.  As so many others here, I started with X10, then added Insteon and then moved to Zwave. When my PLM expired I went  100 % Zwave with now some 60 devices and have never regretted my choice.

The big advantage of ISY is that you can mix both technologies.

[palayman]

I am also building a new house and have been considering the same questions.

Decided to go with Insteon for all switches and dimmers (2477S/2477D). Have a lot of success with them in previous homes. Decision was made easy by a half price sale at Christmas time. With about 100 devices it was a considerable saving!

Have used a number of 6 button switches in the past but have no plan for these in the new house.  Find that we both pretty well exclusively use Google Home voice commands and the buttons don't get pushed very often. Plan is to have at least one google home device, probably the home hub, in each room.

Have not had much success with the Insteon Ceiling fan controller.  Had problems with the light flashing intermittently and replace with an inline module. Also find we don't change fan speeds often (never) and decided to got with 2477S/2477D combos for all fans - about 20.

Found I don't use dimmers in hallways or the basement or garage so they are all 2477S.

Still haven't settled on duplex outlets. Have recently added Z-Wave devices on my sump pump and water heater.  Seems to work well and I like the power monitoring.  Don't have a concern over synchronization with Insteon lights.

Also still considering Motion Sensors.  I tried a few of the original Insteon devices and had trouble programming.  Should have consulted this forum a long time ago.  However, I don't like lights that turn on/off when I enter/leave a room and don't want to spend my life tweaking programs to stop them from waking wife in the middle of the night when I use the bathroom. With LED lights using so little power I tend to leave the lights on all night if necessary and my cameras do I a good job without them anyways.

Maybe someone can convince me to use motion sensors with a killer app?

Have also started using polyglot to integrate Wireless Tags (temp and water montior - house, fridge, freezer, sumps), alarm (DCS) and Door lock (Schlage Sense).

Still need to investigate pool equipment integration (recommendation needed!) and appliance monitoring (Thermador anyone?).

Not sure how old you parents are, but I'm over 60 and have been doing all this without too much effort. I'm sure you parents will like whatever solution you chose.

Paul

 

Edited February 24, 2019 by palayman

[Ajax]

Thanks all keep 'em coming. Yeah I just like insteon simplicity and not having to worrying about healing networks etc. But the fact that I cannot find a sale at this moment for the switches is a little annoying once I realized Menards had them for $19.99, I am looking for about 140 switches and @ $48 a piece is a little steep. 

[mwester]

If you do choose Insteon, don't forget to set up a Subscription on Amazon for them to replace that PLM every two years.  Detailed instructions for the process will be required.

[palayman]

12 minutes ago, mwester said:

If you do choose Insteon, don't forget to set up a Subscription on Amazon for them to replace that PLM every two years.  Detailed instructions for the process will be required.

Don't want to jinx it, but I have 3 PLM's, all about 6 years old and still working.

[Ajax]

See that is the thing my last house was new construction, lived in it for 4 years and my PLM was just fine, maybe I was lucky! Bc  from what I have read failures are the norm.

[adamthp]

13 hours ago, lilyoyo1 said:

I concur with Larryllix in regards to insteon for lighting. Besides familiarity which will help you in the long run, I'm not a fan of the popcorn effect that zwave has when turning on multiple devices. That coupled with the fact that you have to be concerned with different variations of switches from the mfg. (Even from the same one). The ease of use with insteon is much better.

With that said, I do use zwave locks and sensors. I prefer their sensors over insteon's. To build out my mesh network, I've installed a bunch of zwave outlets throughout the house. While the range isn't as good as wall worts and it takes using more of them; I didn't want to be concerned with someone unplugging something and the ugliness that comes with wall worts. 

Zwave to insteon (as it would be the other way around) is slower. However my motion sensors only turn devices off so the delay is not noticed. In cases where they do turn on lights, it's used in area that you walk towards anyway so it's imperceptible as well. I do have a few of the motion sensor ll's. I have not had any trouble out of those so I can't complain. 

Sorry to hijack.

@lilyoyo1  which z wave outlets are you using? Do they work as repeaters?

Back on topic, I'm currently rewiring my shop/barn and plan to use the DIN rail insteon dimmers 2453-222, and a couple of KPLs. If this works out well I'm going to work on a time machine to go back to when I built my house to use these instead of the over abundance of insteon switches I have everywhere. I would much rather just have single gang boxes with KPLs where I currently have multi gang boxes with several switches, or a KPL and blanks. Fingers crossed the barn works out well. 

 

 

[palayman]

21 minutes ago, adamthp said:

DIN rail insteon dimmers 2453-222

I thought about using those for several fixed loads, but it looked like they were discontinued ("unavailable") on smarthome.com. Did see them on a few other sources, but had some concern about long term viability.

[larryllix]

3 hours ago, palayman said:

I am also building a new house and have been considering the same questions.

Decided to go with Insteon for all switches and dimmers (2477S/2477D). Have a lot of success with them in previous homes. Decision was made easy by a half price sale at Christmas time. With about 100 devices it was a considerable saving!

Have used a number of 6 button switches in the past but have no plan for these in the new house.  Find that we both pretty well exclusively use Google Home voice commands and the buttons don't get pushed very often. Plan is to have at least one google home device, probably the home hub, in each room.

Have not had much success with the Insteon Ceiling fan controller.  Had problems with the light flashing intermittently and replace with an inline module. Also find we don't change fan speeds often (never) and decided to got with 2477S/2477D combos for all fans - about 20.

Found I don't use dimmers in hallways or the basement or garage so they are all 2477S.

Still haven't settled on duplex outlets. Have recently added Z-Wave devices on my sump pump and water heater.  Seems to work well and I like the power monitoring.  Don't have a concern over synchronization with Insteon lights.

Also still considering Motion Sensors.  I tried a few of the original Insteon devices and had trouble programming.  Should have consulted this forum a long time ago.  However, I don't like lights that turn on/off when I enter/leave a room and don't want to spend my life tweaking programs to stop them from waking wife in the middle of the night when I use the bathroom. With LED lights using so little power I tend to leave the lights on all night if necessary and my cameras do I a good job without them anyways.

Maybe someone can convince me to use motion sensors with a killer app?

Have also started using polyglot to integrate Wireless Tags (temp and water montior - house, fridge, freezer, sumps), alarm (DCS) and Door lock (Schlage Sense).

Still need to investigate pool equipment integration (recommendation needed!) and appliance monitoring (Thermador anyone?).

Not sure how old you parents are, but I'm over 60 and have been doing all this without too much effort. I'm sure you parents will like whatever solution you chose.

Paul

 

I use Insteon MSes and lights in many rooms. 

To help resolve your issue (middle of the night) ISY has a solution to be able to dimm the lamp levels in the scene. I use these twice per day so that lights don;t blind you at nights when you trigger them and yet still produce 100W equiv. during the day when you want the brilliance.

 

[lilyoyo1]

5 hours ago, palayman said:

I am also building a new house and have been considering the same questions.

Decided to go with Insteon for all switches and dimmers (2477S/2477D). Have a lot of success with them in previous homes. Decision was made easy by a half price sale at Christmas time. With about 100 devices it was a considerable saving!

Have used a number of 6 button switches in the past but have no plan for these in the new house.  Find that we both pretty well exclusively use Google Home voice commands and the buttons don't get pushed very often. Plan is to have at least one google home device, probably the home hub, in each room.

Have not had much success with the Insteon Ceiling fan controller.  Had problems with the light flashing intermittently and replace with an inline module. Also find we don't change fan speeds often (never) and decided to got with 2477S/2477D combos for all fans - about 20.

Found I don't use dimmers in hallways or the basement or garage so they are all 2477S.

Still haven't settled on duplex outlets. Have recently added Z-Wave devices on my sump pump and water heater.  Seems to work well and I like the power monitoring.  Don't have a concern over synchronization with Insteon lights.

Also still considering Motion Sensors.  I tried a few of the original Insteon devices and had trouble programming.  Should have consulted this forum a long time ago.  However, I don't like lights that turn on/off when I enter/leave a room and don't want to spend my life tweaking programs to stop them from waking wife in the middle of the night when I use the bathroom. With LED lights using so little power I tend to leave the lights on all night if necessary and my cameras do I a good job without them anyways.

Maybe someone can convince me to use motion sensors with a killer app?

Have also started using polyglot to integrate Wireless Tags (temp and water montior - house, fridge, freezer, sumps), alarm (DCS) and Door lock (Schlage Sense).

Still need to investigate pool equipment integration (recommendation needed!) and appliance monitoring (Thermador anyone?).

Not sure how old you parents are, but I'm over 60 and have been doing all this without too much effort. I'm sure you parents will like whatever solution you chose.

Paul

 

For my lighting loads, I went with all dimmers whether I dim or not. I like the uniformity around the house, the ramping effect, and the fact that there's no click when a light is turned on or off. 

I like using motion sensors to turn stuff off rather than on. I'm like you in that I don't want to constantly mess with the system and there are times I simply don't need/want the light on. I would recommend using in rooms that you don't frequent alot. That way if a light is left on, you don't find out days later. 

[lilyoyo1]

5 hours ago, mwester said:

If you do choose Insteon, don't forget to set up a Subscription on Amazon for them to replace that PLM every two years.  Detailed instructions for the process will be required.

I've never had plm issues. While the plm I use in my house is new (the whole system is), my test ISY uses my old plm that was an old customer return for the plm issue that was given to me to test. Sometimes a person's home simply isn't a good fit for a particular technology

[lilyoyo1]

4 hours ago, adamthp said:

Sorry to hijack.

@lilyoyo1  which z wave outlets are you using? Do they work as repeaters?

Back on topic, I'm currently rewiring my shop/barn and plan to use the DIN rail insteon dimmers 2453-222, and a couple of KPLs. If this works out well I'm going to work on a time machine to go back to when I built my house to use these instead of the over abundance of insteon switches I have everywhere. I would much rather just have single gang boxes with KPLs where I currently have multi gang boxes with several switches, or a KPL and blanks. Fingers crossed the barn works out well. 

 

 

Personally I would wire the house as a dummy house rather than use remote systems such as the din rail. While it can look cool at first glance, reselling can be more difficult as it may be too modern/techie for alot of people. 

 My outlets are Cooper aspire (Eaton). All hardwired zwave devices repeat. My outlets do support beaming which allows you to use with things like door locks and other secure devices. I went with these over other brands because they feel like a high quality product. The plastic on the outlet is much higher quality than found on others such as he and leviton. The button to include/exclude as well as turn on/off also feels much better than other brands.  The relay doesn't sound as clunky either. This is why I went with the Cooper over other brands. The attention to detail was much better. 

With that said, I don't believe they have a zwave plus version out yet. Since this is a new install, I would go with all zwave plus devices. GE has a zwave plus outlet which works well. While it's still short of Cooper's build quality it's not a bad device. I have 1 that I bought to test with and it works really well. 

[Ajax]

Lilyoyo1 are you referring to these?

 

https://www.amazon.com/EATON-Wiring-RF9540-NDW-Aspire-Dimmer/dp/B00S9KMLCI/ref=asc_df_B00S9KMLCI/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=194019628201&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13185214876408767246&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9018273&hvtargid=pla-340551338844&psc=1

[lilyoyo1]

Eaton RFTR9505-TAW Tamper Resistant Z-wave Split Control Duplex Receptacle, 110v /15-Amp, Alpine White Finish https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SC2ZGI/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_aDXCCbJH4EHGW

[lilyoyo1]

Ge zwave plus version

https://www.amazon.com/GE-Receptacle-Controllable-SmartThings-14288/dp/B07361JZ2H/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=ge+zwave+plus+outlet&qid=1551046591&s=gateway&sr=8-2

[adamthp]

@lilyoyo1

I'm going to try one of the GE outlets. I currently have sirens as repeaters... but I'd rather tidy up the install a bit.  Thanks!

[lilyoyo1]

2 minutes ago, adamthp said:

@lilyoyo1

I'm going to try one of the GE outlets. I currently have sirens as repeaters... but I'd rather tidy up the install a bit.  Thanks!

I don't blame you. I'm surprised Eaton's cost so much to be older technology. The build quality is great but not at the expense of where technology stands. If I were building again today, I'd go with the ge myself.

Remember, you'll most likely need additional devices since they will loose some signal strength being embedded. 

Edited February 24, 2019 by lilyoyo1

[mwester]

2 hours ago, lilyoyo1 said:

I've never had plm issues. While the plm I use in my house is new (the whole system is), my test ISY uses my old plm that was an old customer return for the plm issue that was given to me to test. Sometimes a person's home simply isn't a good fit for a particular technology

Your implication is that all those who've been suffering from the "two-years-and-dead" PLM problem should believe that the issue IS THAT THEIR HOME IS NOT A GOOD FIT for Insteon??!!   And you base this on the fact that you, one individual, haven't experienced this problem???

I've re-read your post several times, but I just can't parse that sentence any other way.  Perhaps you can clarify what you really mean?

[larryllix]

My PLM is four years old now and never been a problem yet either. On a sale, i nervously bought another PLM which I put into service for almost a year now but after figuring some GDO might have been my new PLM acting  defectively, I switched it back a few months ago.

Noise electrical environments can weaken PS filter components. Weak PS components are reported to be/were a common problem. A noisy electrical environment can  accelerate any PLM failure as will extreme temperatures,  liquid immersion, or physical shock.

Edited February 25, 2019 by larryllix

[mwester]

I'm laughing myself silly, larrylix!      Seriously, you're trying now to tell us that everyone who suffers from the PLM failure problem has been throwing their PLMs against the wall, dropping them in pails of water, putting them in freezers and ovens, and/or has unusual electrical noise on their power lines?  I think we can safely rule out all of those issues, with the only possible point-of-argument being what one would consider to be "unusual" electrical noise.  I'd maintain that if the problem is the quality of power (which I don't believe for an instant - see below), then given the number of folks experiencing the issue, it's far more likely that those who do NOT have a failure are the ones with "unusual" power.

Now the issue is, as has been CLEARLY identified by others and documented in the lengthy PLM repair thread, that Insteon has used the wrong type of capacitors in the PLM (and in the hub, for that matter) -- the capacitors used are not designed for high-frequency switching power-supply use, and fail as one would expect them to fail when  used in an application for which they were not designed.  So, I respectfully reject both your and lilyoyo1's theories that it's about water, temperature, noise, surges, or just plain "fit" (whatever that means)!  The problem is simply that they use (present tense) the WRONG components.

BTW, I have a whole-house surge suppressor -- multiple actually (one on each panel).  Solves a lot of issues, and highly recommended -- but it doesn't solve this problem.

Edited February 25, 2019 by mwester