Hi, I recently purchased a rental home and the previous owner had the following already installed:
Bradford White electric water heater
Insteon 240V 30 AMP Load Controller
I recently purchased a ST hub and cannot get it to pair with the load controller. I’m new to home automation, so apologies in advance if my setup if incomplete or incompatible.
The water heater has stopped working intermittently. Given this property is a rental, I’d like to be able to remotely monitor and control the water heater, depending on when guests reserve the home.
I would appreciate suggestions as to what options are available.
Insteon uses their own proprietary protocol. It will not connect directly to a SmartThings hub.
Some community members who had extensive Insteon installations before getting SmartThings do set up a “man in the middle” server, but it’s probably not going to be worth it for a single device.
You can read more about what devices will work with SmartThings as well as a link to the Insteon project in the community – created wiki article on supported protocols:
I should mention that there are several devices that will work in place of the Insteon if you want to start looking into those. The higher draw ones are more expensive than the regular residential ones, you’re probably looking at somewhere between 80 and $200 but then you will have direct compatibility with SmartThings.
There’s a Leviton 30 amp device on The official compatibility list which uses zigbee.
A GE heavy duty Switch rated for outdoor use that also uses Z wave. Right now this is only available in the older generation, classic zwave. But GEhas recently brought out a bunch of their other Z wave switch is in the newest generation, Z wave plus, so that might be worth waiting for.
And a smartenIT zigbee Relay which is also rated for 30 A. This one is bigger, but also more weatherproof than the small micros.
So several choices if you decide you want to replace the insteon device.
AlSo since you’re new it’s good to know that prices vary a lot and Amazon is not always the least expensive. A lot of times we’ll post Amazon links just because they’re Easy to find, but you still want to shop around.