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<TITLE>Smarthome Insteon vs. HAI UPB</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>Okay... So there seem to be a lot of new technologies out there these days that are replacing X10.<BR>
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HAI just started shipping their UPB dimmers, and SmartHome just started shipping their Insteon SwitchLinc dimmers.<BR>
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Other than the obvious “HAI supports their own switches in firmware” issue (I suspect they’ll be adding Insteon support), does anyone have any opinions on either switch type? I’ve got such a mix right now — ACT, Compose, SwitchLinc — and I need to start consolidating to a single brand/type because of the weird mismatches between brands (as far as scenes/etc goes).<BR>
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I’ve played with Insteon — I just ordered (but have yet to install) two dimmer switches. I’ve been playing with the actual lamp modules for quite some time now, and have been very impressed with the reliability (they turn on *every* time I hit the button) and the scenes. Also, the X10 compatibility makes them work with my existing HAI OP2 without adding any extra modules. In fact, they act just like regular SwitchLinc 2-way switches when you program an X10 address into them.<BR>
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What would be the benefit to going with HAI-UPB products? It’s not price, since UPB is more expensive than Insteon switches (even via Worthington); they’re about equals on that. Insteon has better looking switches (IMHO), and the ability to change the LED color pipes is a really nifty (but useless) feature that I like.<BR>
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Rather than use straightforward scenes, it looks like HAI has adopted the weird Compose ‘rooms’ concept, which I still haven’t found terribly useful. It seems much easier to just assign individual addresses to each scene like SwitchLinc and Insteon do... On the flipside, perhaps I’m not understanding exactly how to implement the HAI-UPB scene/room/master functions...<BR>
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Of course, I have no idea how Insteon will integrate with the OP2 (or if it will) since it doesn’t have visible addressing (there’s no “a1”, “a2”, etc). But SmartHome says the home controller will be able to “download” the scene information from the existing switches in the house once an interface is installed (no idea how they plan on doing that one)...<BR>
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Comments? Thoughts?<BR>
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Justin</SPAN></FONT>
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