What technology direction to go?

Posted on
Wed May 01, 2019 9:44 am
bbruck offline
Posts: 343
Joined: Oct 05, 2008

What technology direction to go?

I've had Insteon throughout my houses for perhaps 10 years. Now in my smaller house, I still have perhaps 30-40 Insteon switches and sensors. However, as I need additional lighting controls, I'm starting to move to Hue - still controlled with Indigo - and I'm beginning to wonder about the future of Insteon as a technology. For instance, today I ordered two Hue bulbs @ $10 each to replace my two Insteon $35 bulbs, which never really work consistently. All the home automation that i've bought in the last couple years is either zigbee or Hue - my MyQ garage door controller, Spruce irrigation controller, Ecobee thermostat. Most often I don't integrate these with Indigo, because the native apps are sufficient for me.

And truth to tell I want something that works easily - I'm a consumer, not a programmer or aficionado.

It just seems like the home automation world has left Insteon behind. I'm struggling to get Alexa to work with Indigo; and in general it seems like Insteon is becoming a dead-end technology. Even Indigo has many new Z-wave devices each release but nothing new for Insteon - perhaps because there aren't any new Insteon devices? Dunno.

Anyway - here I am with a PILE of aging Insteon devices, and as they need replacement, or as I have minor new needs, I'm less and less inclined to make any further investments in Insteon technology. And REALLY don't want to start exploring Z-wave since my additional needs are usually simple lighting things.

And I guess more generally it seems like the world is shifting away from the Indigo-type model to the Alexa-type model, if you know what I mean.

Anyone else in my position? What are you legacy Insteon users thinking these days?

Posted on
Thu May 02, 2019 9:41 am
peszko offline
Posts: 311
Joined: Mar 07, 2012

Re: What technology direction to go?

I had insteon for a long time, but am also moving away from it. Could never get it to work reliably. I'm moving to z-wave, and so far so good. For me I'm not willing to go to the consumer type automation like Alexa or Google home. The privacy invasion and total reliance on them is a no go for me. With indigo I have something that works and doesn't report everything that happens in my house to a third party like Amazon, Google and others. (and all their affiliates... Cambridge Analytica anyone?) Also, if Indigo goes away today, I can just stay with what I have. With cloud based systems if they pull the plug my system goes down. With Indigo, I can also make it fairly simple or extremely complicated. At this point, I would say its either Indigo or Homeseer. My choice is Indigo and I'm happy with it.

Posted on
Thu May 02, 2019 9:45 am
peszko offline
Posts: 311
Joined: Mar 07, 2012

Re: What technology direction to go?

To Mat and Jay, if you ever drop Indigo, please deactivate the license restriction when moving to a new hardware before you retire it.

But, I hope you are not thinking of that any time soon.

Posted on
Thu May 02, 2019 11:16 am
matt (support) offline
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Re: What technology direction to go?

peszko wrote:
To Mat and Jay, if you ever drop Indigo, please deactivate the license restriction when moving to a new hardware before you retire it. But, I hope you are not thinking of that any time soon.

We aren't going anywhere!

Image

Posted on
Wed May 08, 2019 8:00 am
johnpolasek offline
Posts: 911
Joined: Aug 05, 2011
Location: Aggieland, Texas

Re: What technology direction to go?

peszko wrote:
I had insteon for a long time, but am also moving away from it. Could never get it to work reliably. I'm moving to z-wave, and so far so good. For me I'm not willing to go to the consumer type automation like Alexa or Google home. The privacy invasion and total reliance on them is a no go for me. With indigo I have something that works and doesn't report everything that happens in my house to a third party like Amazon, Google and others. (and all their affiliates... Cambridge Analytica anyone?) Also, if Indigo goes away today, I can just stay with what I have. With cloud based systems if they pull the plug my system goes down. With Indigo, I can also make it fairly simple or extremely complicated. At this point, I would say its either Indigo or Homeseer. My choice is Indigo and I'm happy with it.


I definitely agree with the nocloud model; I think that more and more folks are starting to figure out that "Hey Alexa" (or Siri or Google) is a good way to let a lot of strangers dig through your life; but I'm having to hang onto some Insteon devices because Z-wave (and I assume Zigbee and all other RFD only protocols) have a fatal flaw; you can't put devices on both sides of a grounded metal wall (detached garage, barn, exterior lamp posts, etc) and get a reliable signal through. Now if somebody smarter than me would come up with a Z-wave "relay over PL or Ethernet" that can bridge that gap, I'd be phasing out Insteon right and left, but until they do, the barn, garage, and all mom's lamp posts will stay power line linked.

Posted on
Wed May 08, 2019 8:38 am
peszko offline
Posts: 311
Joined: Mar 07, 2012

Re: What technology direction to go?

johnpolasek wrote:
Now if somebody smarter than me would come up with a Z-wave "relay over PL or Ethernet" that can bridge that gap, I'd be phasing out Insteon right and left, but until they do, the barn, garage, and all mom's lamp posts will stay power line linked.


Same problem here. I have places outside of the house that z-wave would have hard time reaching. I haven't found a solution yet, but I'll keep on looking. Possibly Indigo could implement multiple z-wave interfaces, then I could run USB over CAT5 to the outside structures.

Posted on
Wed May 08, 2019 9:10 am
jltnol offline
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Joined: Oct 15, 2013

Re: What technology direction to go?

Like the OP, I've got a lot invested in Insteon. Moved into a bigger house 2 years ago, and put in a lot. But like the OP, I also have reliability issues with Insteon as well. Even in my former house, I pegged reliability at about 95%, maybe a bit higher, which means about 5% of the time, it doesn't work as planned. I's say its about the same in my new house. And don't even get me started about latency.

From my perspective, while the data that travels thru the house wiring side of Insteon should work, its the RF side that I find problematic. When Indigo issues an "All Off" Command, it does take a while for all those data packets to travel on whatever route they take to get to where they are going, and while it does work by and large, most of the time it's not 100%. I guess it's possible nothing will ever be.

In my dreams, Insteon moves to WiFi, and drops the RF channel altogether. New Insteon WiFi devices would still communicate via house wiring to older devices installed on the same phase, and then via RF to older devices not wired to the same phase. Complicated, but I could easily see this happening. The advantage here is that you could replace older devices gradually, and wouldn't have to do it all at once.

WiFi does seem more reliable than both of the current Insteon communication protocols, and FASTER. I'd be guessing, but my guess is WiFi is faster than Z-Wave as well. As far as privacy goes, I could easily set up a "private" WiFi network and only connect HA devices to it. Wifi is much more ubiquitous, and just seems more mature than decades old RF protocols. At the time, I'm sure Insteon RF was "breakthrough technology", but that was years ago, and I just don't think of it as "breakthrough" any more. Good for a device or two, but not for extensive communication for HA. And of course, I understand that WiFi is just a different flavor of RF, but built to handle immense amounts of data.

In the move to the new house, I did invest in some Z-Wave switches and dimmers and other devices, and find it slightly more reliable than Insteon, but still not 100%.

I will tell you that I love the Insteon Keypads, and not sure what could ever replace them, although some small touch screen device, like a tiny iPad would be very cool!

And as others have mentioned, I'm not interested in any device that requires data to be sent to a cloud and then back to Indigo for processing. Just ain't going to happen with me.
Last edited by jltnol on Wed May 08, 2019 3:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Posted on
Wed May 08, 2019 10:11 am
johnpolasek offline
Posts: 911
Joined: Aug 05, 2011
Location: Aggieland, Texas

Re: What technology direction to go?

There are several vendors who have begun marketing WiFi plug in modules controllable "from your phone" and "Alexa and google home compliant". But the two that I tried are both cloud based, which cripples their speed waaaay beyond any lags I get using insteon, and throws the word "reliability" out the window if you lose internet connectivity as routinely happened in bad weather when I was still stuck on satellite and still occurs now and then even on broadband wireless... ANd +1 on the keypadlinks, although I've had several of them die after 2 or 3 years of service; I keep hoping for some kind of equivalent to Kiosk pro for android to show up so I could grab a few of the $50 6" or 7" droid pads and come up with a frame that would hold it and bolt onto a switchbox and hold the power supply behind the pad locked into a control page collection through the web browser...

Posted on
Wed May 08, 2019 10:16 am
FlyingDiver offline
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Posts: 7189
Joined: Jun 07, 2014
Location: Southwest Florida, USA

Re: What technology direction to go?

You might consider the Lutron Caseta modules for your remote switches. If you put their smart hub pro in the remote building on ethernet or wifi, it should work fine with Indigo in the main house.

I'm not sure what happens if you put two of the Lutron hubs on the same network. Right now the plugin can only be configured to talk to one hub, but that's certainly fixable.

Lutron RadioRa 2 would work as well, but that's more complicated to install.

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

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