Blog Archives

Turn off air conditioning when doors are open

Spring is here, which means great weather and open doors or windows. In the past, the routine has been “Open door, close screen door, turn off air conditioning”. But with an Insteon-controlled thermostat and door/window sensors, the third part of

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 26

Put your house to sleep at day’s end

After a long day, who can be bothered to remember to turn off lights or lock the doors? Fortunately it’s easy to automate this with Insteon and some simple programs in the ISY-994i. The concept behind this is pretty simple:

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 14

Blink house lights when your smoke alarm goes off

Smoke detectors are a great investment in protecting your home; the First Alert devices with ONELINK allow all detectors in your house to connect to each other, so when the one in the basement goes off all the others are

Posted by Matt Chiste
March 4

Provide indirect lighting anywhere with an LED light strip and Insteon

I’m a huge fan of LED lights, whether the application is to save electricity, run Christmas lights, or provide indirect pathway lighting. Today’s project is along the same vein as the pathway lighting, but with LEDwholesalers‘ color-changing LED strip. This

Posted by Matt Chiste
February 7

Automate home systems while on the road

While at CES earlier this month, I was faced with a challenge when I had housekeepers scheduled to come while I was on the road. Normally if I wasn’t going to be home I’d leave a key in the mailbox,

Posted by Matt Chiste
January 28

Make your Insteon Smart Home smarter with location information

By now you’ve probably got a decent number of Insteon-enabled devices in your home, like switches, thermostats, keypads, motion sensors, door sensors, and leak sensors, to name a few. Your house is getting smarter and smarter every day with your

Posted by Matt Chiste
October 13

Use Pushover as an alternative to SMS or email notification

Out of the box, your ISY-994i can send texts and emails. With the Network Module it can do even more, such as calling custom code to send you a picture of who just rang your doorbell. There’s nothing really wrong

Posted by Matt Chiste
October 10
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