I had a moderate Smarthome X10 installation in a previous home. When planning my current home, I looked at several HA technologies and selected Insteon managed by ISY as my solution. It has been a good decision and with the support of UD and SH I have a rock solid installation. My only concerns after 10 months is that the PLM and IRLinc Receiver present difficult and labor intensive points of failure recovery.

 

If a PLM dies, its insteon id is linked to every device in your network -- there needs to be a way to set the id of the replacment so that it matches the defective device. The ISY handles most of this but RF devices are difficult to update links in the best of situations. Could the PLM address be made software updatable by user or ordered custom from Smarthome?

 

The IRLinc receiver is very labor intensive to build. I've got a couple hundred IRLinc devices to control lights, security, irrigation, and HVAC. My first one died with about 50 devices. I cringe when I think about having to "train" another one and then relink it to all scenes and programs. First, could the insteon id be software updatable. More importantly, all learned IR codes and devices need to be exportable so it can be quickly imported into a replacement.

The six digit Insteon ID is hard coded into the PLM or any Insteon device at the factory.

Maybe special order as I believe Smartlabs has a way of changing the ID number and firmware in a module.