Re: Lighting switch state communication

[Marc_F_Hult <MFHult@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 9 Feb 2007 16:38:49 -0500, "intergate news groups"
<djraher@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
<12spqfa9v1hin3b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>I am planning out my new home HA system, and one of the requirements is to
>have a light switch status, or more precisely, change in status,
>communicated back to the ELK system I will be using. It dawned on me that my
>plans to use X10, INSTEON, or Z-wave may not RELIABLY provide this
>capability. I had been thinking that if I changed the light in question via
>IR, that the communication of status would work, but not so if the switch
>itself was used.  Has anyone any real life experience with communicating
>switch status using any of these protocols?

I have INSTEON and an Elk M1G but am running INSTEON under Homeseer and have
also used SmartHome's HouseLinc software which makes setup simple and ends
for all time the tedium of codewheels and mechanical configuration.

HouseLinc reports status of switches if queried.

Homeseer  monitors without any prompting and reports status as % dim at the
last change (= current status) in  day:mo:yr & hr:min:sec format regardless
of whether the change was under computer control or manually at the switch.

I have not monitored to see INSTEON/Homeseer reporting/logging is 100%
accurate.

Other than sometimes having a collision of commands if I push the buttons on
two dimmers in the same switch box exactly simultaneously (one finger on each
button), INSTEON has been working flawlessly in a house in which X-10 was
perennially flaky despite considerable investment in time, circuit
reconfiguration, monitoring equipment, filters, and coupler/amplifiers.

The " two-switch glitch " apparently occurs because one of the dimmers is a
Slave (located at the top of the stairs) that sends a signal to the actual
Master dimmer (at the bottom of the stairs). If these were two Master
dimmers, it is likely that the failure of the dimmer to respond  would not
occur, but that the inevitable collision might/would mean that one or both of
the state changes would not get received by the INSTEON interface and
therefore not be logged.  I'll check this out tomorrow and report back.

This collision problem is much more severe with X-10 than INSTEON because of
X-10's much slower data transmission rate.


HTH ... Marc
Marc_F_Hult
www.ECOntrol.org