We’re building up a collection of tips for the Insteon Director mobile app. Check back as we continue to add more.
Midnight Off and Cleanup
Often it makes sense to have a scene go through your home and turn unnecessary lights off and clean up any LED buttons that might be out of sync due to controlling a device through Director in a multi-way scene. When you turn off a switch in the App that is part of a multi-way scene, the corresponding actor LEDs are not turned off (unless you trigger the scene in Director). This will cause LEDS on the actor switches to be out of sync in your home. Depending on your lifestyle this might make sense to run at 11:00pm, midnight, 2:00am, or whatever time you know everyone will be in bed. This scene includes an “off” for all the devices you want to turn off in the middle of the night. Obviously, if you have some lights such as your front porch light that you want to keep on during the night you would not include this in the scene. Not only may you want to turn off any lights that you don’t want on overnight, but also the keypad buttons corresponding to those lights and any switches that act as actors.
3-Way Switches (multi-way 4 or more)
When you install Insteon switches in a 3-way circuit (2 or more switches wired to the same light fixture), to program them so they are synchronized, you’ll want to create a scene in Director with 3-way switches set as both Director and Actor. Then use the scene to control them, rather than the individual devices in the app.
Pseudo Random Schedules
One way to create pseudo random schedules is to create multiple scenes for lights to appear random. For instance, if you create 3 scenes, let’s call them Sunset Weekend, Sunset MWF, and Sunset TuTh. You can schedule these scenes at slightly different on and off times that run on different days. Although not random, someone would really need to pay attention across the week to figure out they are not random. In these scenes you might turn different lights on in the house to show there is different movement. If you want to appear even more random, you could create 7 different scenes, one for each day of the
week. If you mix in different lights, someone will really need to watch your home closely for over a week to detect a pattern.
If you want to be even more geeky, you can create layered scenes. Let’s take the Weekend, MWF, and TuTh examples above. You create 6 scenes as follows:
On Weekend – Turns on a group of lights, but with no off time.
Off Weekend- Turns the first group of lights off as you turn bedroom lights on (or other lights on).
On MWF - Turns on a group of lights, but with no off time (different time).
Off MWF - Turn the first group of lights off as you turn bedroom lights on (or other lights on, different time).
On TuTh- Turns on a group of lights, but with no off time (different time).
Off TuTh - Turn the first group of lights off as you turn bedroom lights on (or other lights on, different time).
Disable A Schedule
This is a temporary hack until we add the enable/disable schedule feature. If you want to keep a schedule but disable it, you can unclick all of the days. Effectively this preserves the schedule and the on/off time, but it will not run.
Rooms are not just “rooms”
We want to remind users that “Rooms” do not need to be a physical room. In devices (and soon in scenes), you can put a device into one or more rooms, and favorites. However, you can consider a room a category or theme rather than just a physical room. For instance, you might have a room called “Summer” for the devices you want to control on your patio during the summer. Or a room called “Holiday Decorations” for the devices that control your Holiday decorations. By organizing devices into themes, you can make navigation of devices easier.
Holiday Plug-in Modules
Some customers unplug their on/off or dimmer module when they put away their holiday lights. Some have asked if it is better to leave the plug-in in place or pack it up. I would recommend you leave it plugged in. Additional plugin modules improve the speed and reliability of your Insteon network. In addition, we are working on a remote support tool that allows more diagnostic capability with these plugins left in place.