I started with Insteon almost 20 years ago and, on the whole, have been very happy with the functionality and reliability - I’m acutally still on the same PLM I started with!
Over the years, I have added some Z-wave devices, starting with thermostats and motion sensors. Later, I added Hue bulbs and recently I’ve took delivery of a RATGDO for my garage door. I’m starting to get the feeling that the eisy is a system of delicately balanced systems that is just looking for an excuse to stop working.
The eisy works great for the Insteon stuff, but I sometimes struggle to get the Z-wave and Hue stuff to work as I would like. Some of this is due to not finding good or up to date information. I started looking at HA when I got the RATGDO and it looks like it might be worth my time to convert my home over to HA. My Insteon network has about 35 devices, the Z-wave about 15, and I have about 40 Hue bulbs and switches.
Some of the specific questions I have are:
- When adding a Z-wave device to my current network, I have to either bring the device close to the eisy or manually carry my eisy to the device’s installed location. I understand this is a limitation of the Z-wave protocol. (my house is about 7000sqf). Once added, the Z-wave devices seem to work find wherever they are in the house. Does HA provide a more convenient way to do this? I plan on running HA on a VM from my rackmounted Proxmox machine, so carrying that from place to place is not really an option.
- How well does HA work with Hue? I’ve been using the Hue plugin for the eisy which works ok, but recently lost connection to the Hue bridge after I modified my home network (switched to pfSense instead of the ATT router). I’ve been unable to make them talk to each other since. It probably a pretty simple process, but there is a lack of comprehensive and up to date documentation on the eisy side of things.
- How well does HA allow different protocols to work together? Let say I wanted to use a dimmer switch to control some can lights that are directly connected to the dimmer, and also some Hue bulbs that always have power? Can you create scenes that contain multiple devices of different types?
- Does HA have any significant limitations in setting ramp rates for lights? At the moment, my lights dim as the evening hour progress. They are set at the maximum ramp rate in the eisy (8 minutes) and the rate of change in brightness is almost imperceptible.
- Can you write scripts/programs with more complicated logic that might include “switch/case” type constructs?
Are there any other areas I should be looking at?
Thanks!