Re: A mentor / Advisor ?

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

"Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>To be fair, some of my negative comments were refuted, and they are based on
>first generation stuff. As I said in that thread, maybe things have gotten
>better.
>
>You don't HAVE to use a laptop to carry around, it's just one of the
>options. The other is to just carry around a Z-Wave remote control, add the
>modules to it, and then replicate that to the PC (which is acting as a
>static controller.) The remote remains the master controller.
>
>Z-Wave is far from perfect, but I think I'd choose it over Insteon. That's
>not based on personal experience (well not with Insteon, I do use Z-Wave),
>but just on reading a lot of threads on the relative merits of the two by
>people who do use them.
>
>Ideally, I'd never use any wireless or powerline scheme for something as
>important as lights and thermostats and such. But, I live in a small
>apartment and can't do otherwise for now.

So what do early adopters now do with their first generation hardware? Can
they co-exist with the "maybe better" later things?

Not to denigrate your hands-on experience but six modules in a small
apartment is probably not a good predictor for dozens of modules in a large
residence (e.g. Bruce Robin's Insteon installation). Lutron suggests RF
repeaters within 26 feet of each other for RadioRA (and I believe that is
just one-way). I would expect Z-Wave to need similar density for
reliability. And, unless one of the changes is an increase in max_hops, the
size of an installation is inherently limited so your apartment may not be
atypical in terms of size.

Unfortunately, unless you are building a new house and can hardwire it
during the construction phase, you are pretty much limited to wireless
and/or PLC so the question for most people is which less-than-optimal,
non-hardwire solution is best.

Insteon is two-way with (reasonably fast) automatic ACKs so there's no
necessity to poll.

http://davehouston.net
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/roZetta/
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