Re: [mh] Picking Insteon over Zwave?

[Marc M. <ma...@me...>]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 07:42:29PM -0800, David Satterfield wrote:
> The reason I went with Zwave was because it WASN"T powerline. The last thing I wanted was another flaky solution that was subject to powerline noise, signal suckers, needing phase couplers etc.

So, as you probably read, I was really on the fence between Zwave and
Insteon for somewhat the same reason, but once I read that Insteon had RF
bridges and would retransmit signals throughout the house synchronously,
that sounded good enough that I wanted to try it.
So far, no problem, even with dimmable CFLs. 

I'm sure it's possible for a device to put enough crap on the power line
that insteon wouldn't work and Zwave would, but that could be fixed with a
line filter for that one device.
I specifically liked the idea that I didn't have to worry about RF range or
RF interference while not having to worry about possible device and protocol
interoperability with Zwave.

That said, I think it's fair to say that Insteon will probably work better
in some cases, where Zwave will work better for cases where powerline noise
is crap.
But all other things being equal, insteon being a bit cheaper, 2 way working
with all devices, and linux support being better, Insteon seemed like a
better choice.

Marc
-- 
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R.
Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/