Living Room Light Goes On When PW Starts Charging

[sorka]

For what it’s worth, I’ve got a large number of z-wave devices (64, to be exact) and I’ve been quite happy with z-wave. They use RF communication instead of powerline, so there’s no need to worry about noise on the powerline. Before z-wave I had used X10 for quite a while and I briefly considered Insteon as I was switching away from X10, but after dealing with lots of powerline noise and communication issues with X10 I wanted something that didn’t use the powerline for communication.

I experimented with Z-Wave for a while but found communication reliability through wireless only unreliable. Cordless phones, microwaves, etc. Also their level of scene integration is nowhere near the sophistication of Insteon's.

 

[sorka]

All of my Insteon devices are the newer ones that have redundant powerline and RF mesh.

You really need both for rock solid communication which is one of the reasons I've stuck with Insteon despite trying other solutions.

 

[sorka]

Strangely, my dual-band devices are also failing. So it seems like it's killing ALL ability to transmit, wasn't sure whether a failure to transmit on the power line causes it to not even try to send via RF or something, or if the failure has nothing to do with the power line and it's just ongoing poor-quality of SH/Insteon things in general. My experience has been if you only go with the 2-year warranty you shouldn't expect them to last much more than 2 years, but even when I went with the 7-year warranty things generally wouldn't last more than 2-3 years, I'd just be able to get SH to replace the device once it dies. This is different than for example HDDs, where the drive manufacturers can predict pretty well just when a drive will die these days, so if a vendor offers 2-year and 5-year warranty options, the 2-year warranty drive is basically expected not to last 5 years, where the 5-year warranty drive is expected to last longer than that.

So when you say failing do you mean communications? Your first post talked about them going bad but nothing about com failures.

 

[BrettS]

I experimented with Z-Wave for a while but found communication reliability through wireless only unreliable. Cordless phones, microwaves, etc. Also their level of scene integration is nowhere near the sophistication of Insteon's.

I really haven’t had any communications issues with my zwave devices, but with the mesh network having a large number of devices definitely helps there. If you were only testing with a few devices, especially if they were spread apart then there could be range or interference issues.

 

[wjgjr]

I really haven’t had any communications issues with my zwave devices, but with the mesh network having a large number of devices definitely helps there. If you were only testing with a few devices, especially if they were spread apart then there could be range or interference issues.

This was what I ended up needing (and it's a great way for them to sell more stuff.) When I first started with some z-wave devices, there were reliability issues reaching certain devices in far corners. Adding some more devices around the house significantly improved things.