Venstar Thermostats Reading Incorrectly

[dbj528]

This is my first post and I am a new user so please bear with me. However I have looked through the forums and have found some information regarding the Venstar Thermostats using Insteon but I am still having some issues. I am using;
mControl Version 2.1.3391.3 (Running on Windows XP)
Venstar T1700 Version 2
Venstar T1800 Version 2
PowerLinc 2414U

I have already adjusted the configuration to polling seconds to be 3600 in the mserver.exe.xml which did seem to make things much better, but we are still having issues. It seems to be almost once every couple of days one of the two thermostats will randomly start reporting in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. I have both setup the same way to be recording as F. I have even setup a task to cycle the mControl server every night at 2am because it seemed like it was happening after the program had been running for a certain period of time. But we still see at least one if not both thermostats start reporting in Celsius and also show a program that is different then the actual thermostat shows. I was wondering if anyone has any more tips or tricks to try to get this working any better. This setup is at a remote site so I don't always have physical access and have this system setup to help alert me to any drastic temperature changes, however at this point I may have to set up a webcam pointed at the thermostats just to confirm I am not getting bad data from mcontrol.

Any ideas or help is appreciated!
-Dave

[franzr]

I also have a Venstar v2 thermostat and have struggled with this. What I have found is that I must turn polling off entirely (set value to zero) and avoid sending any two commands or queries to the thermostat quickly (like within 1-2s). This seems to be pretty stable; after a few months now without the problem I am finally comfortable leaving on vacation without unplugging the Venstar adapter.

An annoyance is that you must hit refresh from the browser interface to see updated temperatures--but be careful not to hit refresh two times quickly or immediately after sending a command. It is also frustrating that there is no refresh button on the mobile website, so I can set values from my phone but I never know the actual temperature (or worse, if the Celsius problem occurred).

I do believe this is a bug in mControl, and am hopeful that at some point it might be fixed...

[kingwr]

I as well never got my Venstar 1900 to work correctly with mControl. mControl would poll on the set interval, the Venstar would respond, with what looked like valid data, but the correct temperatures and modes never showed in mControl.

This (so far) works flawlessly with the ISY99i and a new Insteon thermostat adaptor that sends changes (no polling). Even keeps up with the humidity. Of course, that is within the ISY99i. mControl no longer works with my ISY99i.

[dbj528]

My only problem with setting the polling to 0 is that I have a need to monitor the temperature periodically and if there is a danger of freezing I need to send out emails and text messages so that someone can go on site and find out what is wrong. I do have a backup auto-dialer system in place that can do this in emergency but I would really like to be able to monitor this accurately through mControl if at all possible. I have found that when I set the polling to 60 minutes and try to view the status of them as little as possible it seems to work better, but still you will occasionally get a Celsius reading. That is probably what confuses me the most since I tell it this devices only reports Fahrenheit but it still will randomly change, has anyone found a way to hard code this?

[ichiphead]

Folks, I took the year off from home automation and mControl, but I just grabbed the latest and set it up. 2.1.3818.3

Things have been fairly smooth, except for the Venstar Thermostat with the Insteon V2 adapater.

My Venstar thermostat sometimes reads celsius, and thermostat ends up set to strange things -- yesterday i came home to find the set points for heat and cool set at zero. And the house was ten degrees hotter than it should have been. Does mControl actually support the V2 thermostat adapter? If not, can we expect support at some point in the future? ..This is an important item for me.

I guess I'll try turning the polling off.