The Pod Posted August 12, 2009 Posted August 12, 2009 I am the vice president of the Chicagoland Home Automation Users Group. When Insteon was first announced, we scheduled a rep from Smarthome to come to one of our meetings and talk about the new technology. The presentation was very impressive and several of us ordered Insteon starter kits the next day. Then came the big let down. Yes Insteon was faster than X-10 but the interface to Homeseer or the Elk M1G was incomplete and or just didn't work right. Then there was older firmware issues that didn't allow the devices to communicate with the HS plugin correctly. Then the dreaded SwitchLinc failures started kicking in. Lost 8 of my 10 SwitchLincs, they just went dead. Although I was able to RMA them with Smarthome, there was no easy way of removing old dead links or replacing switches and I started removing Insteon devices from my setup and tossing them in my box of unused HA modules. Slowly I started to move more away from Insteon and look at other technologies like UPB and Z-Wave. Over the past 6 months I've been talking to one of our members at our meetings about his ISY and setup as I knew he had a large investment in Insteon devices 80+. And the more we talked, it sounded like I should give the ISY a try. Bought my ISY-99 Pro a few weeks ago and couldn't be happier! Not only did it work with and recognize all my old ver 1.0 devices, it allowed me to easily program and remove links. One of the biggest complaits I first had with Insteon when they first came out was trying to setup a scene on a ControLinc in which some lights in the scene were to be OFF. The best I could do was to Dim them to the lowest level 3%, but you still saw a glow from the light. Not with the ISY, set the scene, add the lighting device and slide the Dim slider all the way to zero and the lights turn off when turning on the scene. Then to make things even better, since HS stopped development of their Insteon plugin and was going the route of supporting the ISY, I removed the HS plugin and PLC, installed the HS-ISY plugin and all the devices came across without issue, even the new Insteon Motion sensor I'm now testing. There is direct 2-way communication between my ISY and my Homeseer computer and everything works as I define it to. I have since dug out my box of old unused HA modules looking for all my unused Insteon devices and finding new uses for them. Big thanks to the Universal Devices staff for a very fine product!
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