new house - insteon advice

[bdee1]

I recently moved into a new house and left a lot of my old Insteon gear installed in the old house. so i am starting over fresh at the new place. I was just looking at the smarthome site and saw that things have changed a bit with insteon - they now have dual band devices, eliminating the need for the access points.

has anyone had any experience with these? are they nice and reliable with homeseer?

Which PC interface do i use to connect it to homeseer? is it this one?
http://www.smarthome.com/2413U/Power...al-Band/p.aspx

i posted this to the main area and Rupp told me to post here - heres the original thread:
http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?p=907981

[alevey]

I use all Insteon now and only do because of the huge price break I got on my devices... if I had to pay full price or even wholesale for Insteon, I would not and I'd have done Z-wave. Z-wave is what will be in most low-mid level automated homes over the next 5+ years. SmartHome just does not make good decisions (business and/or offerings) in my opinion and that will be their downfall and is why Z-wave is proliferating even though Insteon has ha huge first comer advantage.

If you are starting over I suggest looking into...

UPB
- Pros: rock sold
- Cons: not as well supported around the industry, limited devices avail and that will not likely change. I don't see this market growing but the following will keep it alive.

OR

Z-wave
- Pros: pretty much the defacto industry standard for DIY at this point. Many huge vendors integrate Z-wave into their products and tis list will definitely grow over the next year or two.
- Cons: mixed reviews from users

[bdee1]

well I like the fact that UPB is rock solid - reliability is important. but so is variety in devices... so because of the lack of variety it sounds like UPB may not be for me.

z-wave sounds interesting but if its getting mixed reviews - does that mean it is not very reliable?

have you used insteon before and how do you think it compares to UPB and Z-wave.

[Rupp]

[bdee1]

yea i hear ya on that - but i guess the question in my mind right now is that since i only have experience with insteon - what woudl make zwave components better then insteon - why would i choose zwave over insteon - regardless of weather its for all components or just some.

[Rupp]

yea i hear ya on that - but i guess the question in my mind right now is that since i only have experience with Insteon - what would make zwave components better then insteon - why would i choose zwave over insteon - regardless of weather its for all components or just some.

Well that opinion varies but for me, quality of the product and support in HomeSeer. I have 2 Insteon switches that have failed that I need to switch out. I'm still running my original Z-Wave switches just fine. Wireless is another attractive attribute for me as I still run some X10 devices and Z-Wave will not interfere with these at all. If you have any noise on the power line Insteon and to a lesser degree UPB can be effected Z-Wave being wireless isn't. HomeSeer has built a lot of functionality around Z-Wave which make integration easier as well.
With Insteon the protocol causes support problems. Changing hardware every few months due to various issues is/was my biggest complaint but this seems to be stabilizing. Mark is doing an excellent job at including new devices in the plugin but for each new device you have to write new code. Mark just stated this week that he wasn't going to be able to include the Insteon thermostat as the code was just "to different" from the other Insteon devices. Comparing that to Z-Wave , Rick just upgraded HS 2.4.x to work with any current or new Z-Wave device that is currently manufactured. This isn't to say the Z-Wave doesn't have these hardware issues either. The Z-Troller is going through and upgrade as we speak to support the new security class of devices, so many of us either had to wait for the Z-Troller update or buy a new interface. The Z-Wave locks are worth a new controller. There are other growing pains with Z-Wave as well but it's mostly software changes and not hardware changes.
If you liked Insteon and felt comfortable with the hardware quality and other growing pains or a new protocol then stick with it but be sure to check if the devices you are going to use are supported by the Insteon plugin as this plugin hadn't changed until Mark took it over.