Is Insteon Better than X10 for Home Automation? 284
Paul Carver writes "Smarthome has been advertising Insteon for a while now, but I haven't bought any of it, yet. I've accumulated a fair amount of X10 products over the years, including Smarthome branded signal boosters, signal couplers, noise blockers, and troubleshooting tools. Even so, I'm pretty much fed up with X10. Nothing I've bought has succeeded in making my X10 system more than 'just barely acceptable' and 'better than nothing but not by much'. A Google search for Insteon doesn't turn up much other than their own advertisements and a couple of vaguely positive but not detailed reviews. Is this new technology going to take off? What's the community's consensus on home automation?"
Advertising... (Score:4, Insightful)
I was actually thinking of going with X-10 once, but the advertising became so annoying that when I finally saw the stuff for sale in a local store I changed my mind and decided to boycott the product instead.
Look at ZWave (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, home automation.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this new technology going to take off?
Not any more than X10. See below for reasons why home automation in general, and these two specific products, has not yet taken off.
What's the community's consensus on home automation?
It would be great if it was:
* Cheap (less than 2 * the cost of existing switches and plugs)
* Easy to install and configure for both new homes and retrofits
* Super-reliable - not controllable from other sources, no chance of interference, no chance of failure after power outages, brownouts, etc, can survive multiple lightning strikes and other destructive conditions, falls back to a simple, obvious control state when there's a problem
* Secure
* Works like current technology - guests or prospective home buyers won't be left wondering what the extra buttons do, nor will they wonder how the light is supposed to go on.
* Handles all common types of electrical lighting and appliances correctly automatically - you won't have to worry about plugging a flourescent lamp or fan in where a dimmer module is - it detects it and controls it appropiately
The primary keys being that they be intuitive (ie, simulate normal dumb technology), cheap, and easy to install.
So far every system has failed in nearly every respect. I've been considering the problem for many years, hoping to design my own home automation system, but even if I ignore the installation and cheap aspects (since I'll be doing both with no intent to commercialize) it's difficult to make it so simple that anyone can use it, nevermind meeting the other goals.
So-
Home automation is something that is still very niche. It's expensive, non-trivial to setup, and therefore will not make a huge penetration in the market for some time.
Eventually it'll happen, but certainly not with these systems. The biggest advantage they have is no need for seperate or additional wiring. Insteon has a huge advantage over X-10 due to the wireless capability. Change that to Zigbee, manufacture plug units that are installed in the wall instead of plugged into it, build out the system options to include HVAC, garage door, sprinkler, whole house power consumption monitoring, very secure internet/cell phone access and monitoring, and drop the price to $3-$10 per module in small quantities ($2-$5 in hundred lots) and it'll be killer.
As the "internet generation" gets older we'll see more and more interest in this and the non-trivial setup will become less of an issue. The other issues still need to be addressed.
-Adam
Re:Pathetic... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually a pretty good "Ask Slashdot." When I made the jump to Insteon, the only information out there was on the Insteon and Smarthome websites. Since both of these places were trying to sell me something, it made sense to take what they said with a grain of salt.
Having made the purchase, however, I can honestly say that Insteon is what we have always wanted from X10: Reliable, fast, reliable, inexpensive compared to other protocols, and reliable.
You can call this whatever kind of turf you want if it makes you feel better. I am glad to add to the amount of knowledge on the Internet for anyone investigating the wonderful world of home automation.
Re:Smarthome is free-software hostile with Insteon (Score:3, Insightful)
Example:
http://www.linuxha.com/athome/common/iplcd/index.
And I know for a fact that Neil Cherry (the developer of the above software) got permission from Smarthome to release the software.
Re:Insteon hard to find but X-10? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yahoo! (for example, again) started using pop-ups and for a while things were bad. But it could have been worse, think of X10.com as the bank-roller for many free (as in beer) websites. The dot-com burst could have been worse. Surely enough people got mad and when the Average Joe was complaining about pop-ups the big guys stopped. AFAIK, no 99% respectable site will use pop-ups. I understand that they are desperate when they do. I'm an adult enough to see the need - don't knock their hustle (as the kids say).
(But as others pointed out: the reason you get millions of X-10 results is because it is the name of the home automation standard used. Oh and there are articles about my comment above out there, you just have to look for them.)