nerdboytodd
Newbie
Joined: January 19 2011
Location: United States
Online Status: Offline
Posts: 11
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| Posted: January 19 2011 at 13:25 | IP Logged
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I've had an Elk M1 Gold in my house since we built and moved in Jan 2008. I started dabbling in Insteon for lighting control, but ran into some issues with noisy CFL's causing heartburn. This caused me to only partially deploy Insteon control for some exterior lighting at the house and use the M1 Gold with an M1XSP and an Insteon PLC. This worked, but was very basic.
Recently I started dabbling more and found that if I swapped out my CFL's outside, I was able to solve some of the noise issues and get more reliable Insteon functionality. I'm still stuck with an issue where my well pump (which is a three-phase variable speed pump) will throw a bunch of interference on the wire, but I'm slowly working around those issues. I've got 4 Insteon AP's throughout the house to ensure adequate bridging across phases, etc.
Anyway, I've now got about 20 devices (2 KPL's, 10 Toggle Links, 5 App Modules, and some various other Insteon devices). Around the beginning of the month I decided to start playing with PowerHome again, (I had tried it about about two years ago, but was dealing with the other issues listed above). I've got it running on a machine in my basement (close to my well pump controller). I've got things running fine on 2.1b. I've got the PLC on Com1 and my Elk M1 Gold tied in via Ethernet.
Couple of items I need help with. I've got a Dual-band PLM on the way (should be here from Smart home this week - I'm hoping this can help combat some of the well pump noise). I'm going to use it to replace my existing PLC. How hard is it going to be for me to rebuild my link database to reflect the removing of my old PLC and the insertion of the new PLM?
Also, before I pull the trigger on the purchased version of PowerHome, I'm planning on virtualizing it and running it on a VM on my beefy server in the basement. So couple of questions there. I plan on installing the latest release 2.1.2 on a Windows XP VM using VMWare Workstation 6.0. I've got a physical Com port mapped to the VM and have had some success with this before, so I don't expect any issues. However, I'll be going from my Eval version of PH2 on PC1 to a registered version on 'PC2'. How hard is it going to be to export the database from the existing setup into the new setup? I've spent (wasted if you ask my wife) several hours getting everything built out and I'd like to not lose that effort. However, with the new version just hitting the street and the new PLM showing up shortly, should I just use this as an opportunity to start clean?
I've previously purchased the ELKRM (now RMS) client I had running on my PC's and Windows Smartphone, which I've recently replaced with a Droid X running ElkDroid. Anyway, I liked the ELKRM interface, but they haven't written anything for Android yet, and with the flexibility of the PowerHome API's I'm tempted to try to piece something together akin to Control Center or Device List for my Droid and possibly an Android tablet I'm looking at as I like the less kludgy X10 to Insteon conversion that happens there. FYI, I bought one of the TouchLinc tablets from SmartHome for Christmas, and while it's OK, it's not super reliable and Windows CE is so early 2000's.
Anyway, sorry for the rambling post, I've been absorbing a bunch of great information from these forums and they have helped me work through some of the challenges posed by implementing Insteon in the home, but it's all been very fun. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
NerdboyTodd
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PowerHome Messageboard : PowerHome General
Topic: Ready to take the plunge, just a few Q’s
