I'm considering the purchase of the Elk M1, but would like more info on how well it works with Insteon.
Specifically -
- does it work with the PLM, or does it require a serial PLC
- can it control groups saved to the PLM/PLC
- how does it maintain the status of each light? does it periodically poll, or some other more instantaneous method?
- how reliable is it?
I can't find much on Elk's website, but maybe I'm not looking in the right area.
I have shifted much of my Insteon lighting control over to HomeSeer but still do several things from my M1G with Insteon. My main reason for shifting over to HomeSeer was more event/rule flexibility as well as a litte stronger Insteon support. I'll answer what Ican of your questions. 1) Im not awere of the M1 working with the PLM. I have always used the serial PLC. 2) Groups work great with the M1 and the PLC. You need some of link managment software to configure the goups in the PLC i.e. Powerhome. Powerhome also allows you direclty load the Insteon devices/addreses into the M1 so you don't have to manually add them one by one. 3) Unless this functionality has been added the M1 won't know the status of lighting changes for group commands. It should be able to recognize changes from individual lighting commands or manually hitting a switch. It can do polling and I used to have polling turned on to make sure the status was accurate. I think if you use this feature it polls a device about one every 10 seconds so if you have 12 devices it may take several minutes before the status of every device is updated. 4) If your Insteon communications are good I found group commands to be very reliable. Also if your communications is good individual lighting commands should be reliable. You may run into issues if you execute muliple lighting commands from within a rule, expecially if you have any noise on your line because the M1 fires each lighting command sequentially without about a 1 second delay (I think its about 1 second) and if a prior command has not completed it may be lost.
Overall I found the groups to work the best with the M1 because I have some noise on my line and occassionally individual lighting commands fired sequentially would sometimes fail. This issue had been improved in a prior M1 firmware release where they increased the delay between issueing sequential lighting commands.
Hope this helps. Note that I am using M1 firmware that is probably 8+ months ols so any more recent improvemets are not reflected in my comments.
Overall i am very happy with my M1 and really like the integration between it and HomeSeer.
Matt