It 's been a few months so I thought I'd give an update on how life with Insteon and the ISY has been.
In a word--Outstanding!
It's only been a few months, so I won't comment on build quality, but nothing has failed yet.
I am not an automation professional, or even a hobbiest, I really just want the benefits the HA offers at a price I can justify. Learning the in and outs of Insteon and the ISY took a bit of time, but for the most part I don't think about it. I just push buttons and things happen.
Most of the lights are controlled by Insteon, I'll give you a list:
-Most fixed lights
-front and back yard low voltage
-fountain in back yard
Some things that I do are:
An all lights off button for bedtime- the way it works is, there is a keypad on the wall just outside my bedroom. I push the button and all the lights in the house (except for the bedroom), the fountain, and the low voltage in the back yard turn off as the hallway light outside the bedroom door turns on.
The hallway light which spills into the bedroom is on a two minute timer to give me time to safely get into bed. If I need to use any lights in the bedroom before I actually get into bed, I use "all lights off" on an X10 keypad to turn off the bedroom and hall if it's not already off.
The front yard and back yard low voltage lights are on separate timers. I keep the front on 'til 2am or so, the back goes off earlier.
There is also a timer set to turn the living room lights to what I call "mood" which is basically the look I want most of the time in that room. It may be a bit wasteful, but I don't like the idea of my house being dark when I'm not there.
I have a keypad on the back door that has buttons to control the fountain, low voltage, and other lights in the back yard. I also programmed the wireless controller, but never use it.
The ISY lives in the living room hidden in the entertainment center. I have a Xantach flasher on it's IR sensor (ISY should really have an 1/8" it port), to control the lights with my trusty, and somewhat crusty, old MX-500 remote. I use that to trigger a few different scenes such-as: Mood, movie, Credits (where the lights come on just a bit as the credits are rolling at the end of a movie), desert (puts a dim light over the sofa and turns on a dim light in the kitchen so you can scoop and eat your ice cream).
In the three or four months I've had the system, I only know of one miss-fire. One of the lights didn't turn off when i pressed the "Movie" button.
The price, and options for Insteon were why I went with it. Tomorrow I will order custom etched buttons for the keypads, and next month I will order the new smart home motion sensors for the back yard.
The ISY is a great box, and more importantly they have great people there to help. They graciously and quickly answer all of my amateurish noobie questions here and on their forum. Early on I had a few problem logging into the ISY, but that problem went away. I'll assume it had to do with my old PC. I haven't had to reboot the ISY. I would almost trust it to run my sprinklers! But a simple timer does the job just fine.
~Jay
