Owner's Manual (Complete)

Chapter 9—Groups
2 The Home Control Assistant
A Group example
Suppose that in your home you have a number of outside lights. One light is in the front, one by
the driveway, and another by the back door. There is a separate wall switch for each one, and you
are going to replace the manual switches for each of these with controllable wall switches.
After you install the wall switches, you need to know what settings to use for them. You might
want to turn them all on, off, or dim at the same time. So, you could set them all to the same house
code and unit code. For this example, assume that setting is B-4. Using a control panel, if you
press B-4 ON, all three lights come on. If you press B-4 OFF, then all go off.
Now, while this is very convenient, there are still some times when you want to control each light
independently. So you set them all differently. For this example, assume the front light is set to B-
4, the driveway to B-5, and the back light to B-6. Now you can control each light from a control
panel independently, but you can no longer turn them all on or off with one button.
An HCA group is designed to solve this, allowing you to control each device independently, or all
three as a group, with one control.
 First, you set each light to have a separate address (B-4, B-5, and B-6).
 Then, you create a group that has these three devices as members. Members are devices and
programs from your design that are collected into a group so that you can control them as a
single unit. In this example, the group you create would have each of the three lights as a
member.
 Next, you assign a house code and unit code to the group, so that you can control it (C-1).
When HCA receives a command with the trigger for the group, that command is routed to each
member. In the example, we have created a group called “outside lights” and assigned it to C-1.
When you send an ON command from a control panel to C-1, then HCA receives it and sends an
ON command to each group member, and the three outside lights go on. If you send a C-1 OFF
command, all the lights go off. Since each light that is a member of the group also has a different
house code and unit code, you can also control each one independently. The best of all worlds!
Don’t forget that groups can contain devices using different technologies – X10, Insteon and UPB.
HCA does the best it can in translating what you are doing with the group into the appropriate
commands for each technology.
Planning your groups
Before you start creating groups in HCA, there are several decisions you need to make, aside from
the name of the group and where to place it. You should decide why you want a group and what
you want the group to do. This may include deciding:
 What is the purpose of the group?
 When will you use the group control?
 Will you typically control the group, the individual device, or both?
 Do you want programs included in the group?
 Will you control the group from a control panel, or only through an HCA schedule?
Using devices, schedules, groups, and programs together may get complicated. Some of these
choices involve careful planning in order to keep your plans running smoothly in the Home
Control Assistant.