Home Automation Info

Reviewed by HAI Staff

Overall Rating: 7.2 out of 10

Home Automation Product Features

If you wish to create personalized lighting scenes for favorite occasions, the INSTEON Keypad Dimmer Scene Lighting Starter Kit allows you to design more than 400 scenes for your entire house. This INSTEON Lighting Starter Kit includes one INSTEON KeypadLinc Dimmer, two INSTEON SwitchLinc Dimmers, and two INSTEON Access Points. This starter kit will allow you to control lights individually or multiple lights together as "scenes." Each SwitchLinc and the KeypadLinc can control an individual light, but you can also link the SwitchLincs to the KeypadLinc to control lights remotely. The KeypadLinc's status LEDs indicate if connected lights are on or off.

Note Smarthome Labs provides a complete family of INSTEON lighting devices including SwitchLinc Dimmers, LampLincs, ApplianceLincs, 6- and 8-button KeypadLincs, handheld RemoteLincs, and tabletop ControLincs in a variety of color sets allowing you to expand your starter kit to as many lights in your home as desired.

The INSTEON technology is a great way to transition from X10 devices to wireless technology in a phased approach, and is the only wireless lighting technology that transmits signals via radio frequency and the powerline simultaneously for increased reliability. This capability allows RF-only devices to communicate with X10 devices for an integrated solution.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Ease of Installation

If you are comfortable replacing a traditional wall switch with an INSTEON switch/dimmer, you will be able to install an entire INSTEON lighting solution yourself. The procedure for identifying INSTEON devices is straight forward. If you have a large number of devices to install, identify, and configure in lighting scenes, we recommend you purchase the HouseLinc Desktop Software. In addition to the PC software, this package includes a PowerLinc interface module which enables the software to send and monitor commands on the INSTEON network from your PC. Upon startup HouseLinc will detect any newly installed INSTEON devices for automatic identification, and lighting scenes can be configured without physically "tapping" a button on each device included in the scene.

Note the placement of the Access Points in the home may require some experimentaton before the INSTEON network is established. For those not comfortable tackling the above tasks, Smarthome maintains a list of certified INSTEON installers.

Rating: 7.0 out of 10

Home Automation Product Reliability

While INSTEON provides more reliability in signal transmission throughout the home compared to powerline systems, actual product reliability is difficult to comment on due to the relative newness of this technology. All Smarthome INSTEON products come with a 2 year warranty.

Rating: 7.0 out of 10