Owner's Manual (Complete)

Chapter 5 – Home Modes

The Home Control Assistant

There are two settings for each mode: “Action when entering mode” and “Response while in

mode”. It’s important to understand the distinction. The “Action when entering mode” only

happens when HCA shifts from mode to mode. If the current mode is

Away and is in that mode for

days, nothing g happens. But as soon as the house changes from

Away to Home & Awake, then

each device is examined to see what should happen when entering the

Home & Awake mode.

The choices for what happens upon entering a mode are:

 Do Nothing

 Go Off

 Go On

Let’s first examine the options for what happens when a mode is entered by looking at the

examples given at the start of this chapter.

In this table each device shows what action should be taken when your home enters the mode.

Device Home & Awake Away Home & Asleep

Go On Go Off Go Off

Charger

Go On Go Off Go On

Lighting

Do Nothing Go Off Do Nothing

Pump

Go On Go Off Go Off

Focus first on the “Away” column. When you tell your home that you are leaving everything goes

off. That’s good as it says a lot of energy.

When you return home, or when you wake up in the morning, your home goes into the Home &

Awake mode. The TV is powered on so you can use your remote to actually turn it on – the

picture doesn’t appear because we are just powering on the outlet it is plugged in to. The

circulation pump goes on to make sure hot water is distributed. Nothing is done with Interior

lighting – you turn on what you want when you want it.

When you go to bed, energy is again saved by shutting lots of things off, except for the phone and

iPod chargers which stay powered on so they can change your iPod & cell phone at night.

This is quite a feature! With just a few checkboxes you can control every device in your home to

respond to the most common actions of your day.

We will cover the second set of options – what happens to the device while in the mode - a bit later

in this chapter.

Auto Off

Also on the Green Settings tab are some options to automatically turn a device off after HCA sees

it on for a number of minutes. You can also configure it to dim ‘n’ minutes before it goes off.

For this to work, HCA has to know the device is on. This could be because HCA itself turned it on

or, more usually, the device transmitted when you manually controlled it – like tapping the paddle

ON for a switch. UPB devices can be configured to report state upon local control. Insteon

devices can be linked to HCA to enable status reporting.

For UPB Devices you must use the UPB configuration program to enable the state reporting

option.