Insteon Sensor + trigger causing lights to fluctuate

Hi-

I have an insteon open/close sensor set up in my laundry room on the door so that the lights come on when the door is opened, and go off when the door is closed. This works quite well for normal behavior, and is quite quick - I'm impressed with the basics.

But I don't want the lights to come on with full brightness at night, so I set the default on-level for the insteon link with the sensor to turn it on at 50% when the door opens, and off when the door closes. So far so good.

I set up a trigger in Indigo based on the laundry room sensor - for the trigger I have the sensor open (group 1 received "on"), the condition is whether it is daytime (I have a variable that I check for true/false), and the action is to set the Laundry Room light to 100%. That seemed to work but was quirky, so I set the delay on the action to 1 second - with the idea that I want to light to come on to 50% first, then trigger it to come on all the way after that. That seemed to work better - at least *sometimes* it works properly.

Other times the lights come on dim, then brighten, then dim back to 50%. Occasionally it seems like they go dim, bright, dim, bright. This doesn't happen every time, so it is hard to reproduce. Looking at the logs in Indigo, there doesn't seem to be much info suggesting what might be going wrong - the logs have the same 5 lines whether it is working properly or if the lights are fluctuating...

Received INSTEON "Laundry Sensor" on (button 1)
Trigger Laundry Sensor - full brightness
Schedule Laundry Sensor - full brightness (delayed action)
Sent INSTEON "Laundry" on to 100
Received INSTEON "Laundry Sensor" off (button 1)

So - any thoughts on what might be going wrong? Why would the light go dim --> full brightness then back to dim again?

Or are there better ways to accomplish this behavior? Sidebar: I tried just just using triggers - one for open+daytime-->100%, one for open+nighttime-->50% -- but that had a longer delay in turning on than when I had links set up with the sensor directly, and I'd like the lights to come on even if my computer is off (a rare situation, but does happen occasionally, like when updating macOS).

Thanks,
Jason

[jay (support)]

Insteon is a relatively slow protocol, and depending on what other traffic is happening it might cause inconsistent oddness like this. Also, the implementation on the device itself may also be impacting how it's responding. Unfortunately I don't have a good solution except to keep expanding the delay amount.

Thanks - I'm trying a few different variations to see what is the least quirky.

Today I switched back to triggers to see if the delay is tolerable - it certainly avoids the quirky light fluctuations.

Are there any ways to speed up the triggers? Would a different (non-insteon) open/close sensor be any faster?

[jay (support)]

Z-Wave is quite a bit faster than Insteon (generally) - I myself have completely dumped Insteon in favor of Z-Wave as my primary lighting solution. For instance, I have a Monoprice door sensor that has a direct association with an Inovelli switch (this is basically like an Insteon sensor that's linked to an Insteon switch) so that when the sensor goes on, so does the switch, and vice versa. That solves part of your issue. With the Inovelli switch, you can set a config parameter to adjust the default level that the load dims/brightens to so you would just have a schedule sets that to whatever value you want whenever you need. I think that would solve both of your issues.

Note: I don't have these installed in a house yet (still doing renovation), but I believe this will work without issue (and is likely something I will try once they're installed).