Stacey on IoT | Internet of Things news and analysis

April 16, 2022 by Stacey Higginbotham 180 Comments

Is your Insteon smart home system down? I’m getting reports from dozens of Insteon users that as of Friday their smart home hubs have stopped working. So far, none of them have heard from the company, and Insteon’s Twitter account hasn’t been updated since June 2021. I reached out to Rob Lilleness, the president and chairman of Smartlabs, the company that owns Insteon and have not yet heard back.

However, Lilleness no longer lists Smartlabs/Smarthome/Insteon anywhere on his LinkedIn profile and other members of the Insteon management team have also appeared to decamp Smartlabs based on their LinkedIn profiles. Mike Nunes, the former CIO at Smartlabs lists his role at Insteon/Smartlabs ending in April 2022. Dan Cregg, the chief research officer lists his role at Smartlabs as ending in 2022. Matt Kowalec the president and COO lists his role at Smartlabs as ending in 2020;  and Tom Carter, the CIO doesn’t list his role in the company at all.

Smartlabs is a combination of smart home brands that include Insteon and  Nokia Smart Lighting, which Smartlabs purchased last year. It also owns the smarthome.com web site where consumers can buy Insteon gear. An email to Smartlabs’ corporate office in Irvine, Calif. has not been returned and a call to the listen phone number returns a message saying Verizon could not complete the call and asking me to check the number before trying again. Multiple tries return the same message each time.

Lilleness is a former executive at Nokia who lives in Seattle and invested $7.3 million in the Smartlabs business before taking on his leadership role at the company.  At the time he expressed optimism that Insteon’s proprietary technology could become the underpinning of a big shift to smarter homes. However, the adoption of proprietary technologies such as Insteon didn’t pan out as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee prevailed. And now, with the looming launch of the Matter smart home interoperability standard, Insteon’s core tech will be even further marginalized.

However, this means thousands of Insteon users, who I know as a vocal and pretty satisfied bunch, will be left with gear that doesn’t work. Insteon does provide local control of its smart lights and nodes through hubs in the home, but there are plenty of cloud components to get the system to talk to Alexa or Google. Last year, an outage in Insteon’s AWS cloud frustrated users for several days.

With the current outage, Insteon’s app doesn’t work which means users will be hard pressed to change their device settings and add new gear. I’m hopeful to see if the folks over at Home Assistant or Hubitat can perhaps help stranded Insteon users transfer over to their platforms. It might be possible.

Further reading: With Insteon down, possibly for good, what options do you have for your devices?

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Home Assistant, Hubitat, Insteon, Smartlabs

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I have several Insteon devices that are still working; but I have an Insteon PLM connected to a computer running Indigo (www.indigodomo.com) which is all local. Likely Insteon servers ar down.

Those alternate systems require gadgets we can’t get, and computer knowledge most average people don’t have. I’m not a programmer… unless some company makes a plug n play solution, we are up the creek for good.

Actually, the Insteon Hub itself can be left in place, and can work with HomeSeer. HomeSeer is a program you can run on any computer that you just leave on 24/7. Or you can buy a dedicated HomeSeer box that simply runs on your home network. In this setup, HomeSeer replaces the entire Insteon front end, app, and cloud integrations. I got it up and running on Friday, the day after Insteon shut everything down. I did it with no previous experience with HomeSeer. I think if you have enough technical knowledge to wire Insteon devices into your house and set them up, you will find HomeSeer is not hard to deploy at all. It works as good as, if not better, than before when depending on Insteon’s cloud servers. It was worth it to me to get it working because I have Insteon devices all throughout my house, wired in and would be a pain to replace. I’m so glad the Insteon hub has the ability to do this…and has other workarounds too because it would have effectively bricked the entire system otherwise

Does HomeSeer work with Alexa? I use voice commands all the time to shut light off

Yes it works with Alexa. Without that, it would have little usefulness to me. Works with Google Home too. Once you get it up and running you enable the Alexa skill for HomeSeer. But before you do that, get into your Alexa and delete every connected device and scene that was previously added into your Alexa “Devices”. Because when you use Alexa, you are not talking to Insteon’s cloud server anymore, but Alexa will be commanding your HomeSeer server directly. Old Insteon entries will clutter your “devices” list and even confuse and diminish the smoothness of Alexa voice recognition. I did find that after I had Alexa “discover” all of my devices connected to HomeSeer, I had to give each one a sensible friendly name for Alexa to use. One of the things I like the most is that HomeSeer gives you the ability to control whether each and every device or scene is discoverable by Alexa. By contrast, every Insteon device pops up when you would connect the Insteon Skill. HomeSeer lets you toggle Alexa discovery on or off for every device or scene you have in your system.

Do you need a plm or usb or serial interface or will it talk directly ? Homeasintant can talk directly but have not found a away to set timers ETC so at least i have a life line however thin. Alexa and Google restored and can add devices the old insteon manual way.. If homeseer can talk directly that would be a better path as it will allow programming with its plug in.. But Homeassitant is working on a plug in or better integration as we speak they say the next 2 weeks it should be up and running

im not going to spend more money to half ass their disappearing act. this is bull i will research any smart devices i buy in the future and iff they are affiliated in any way i won’t be buying again ive spent hours the last two day trying to get it to work they could at least announce this. hundreds of dollars down the drain.

Homeseer is worthless. I installed all my insteon devices but cannot get this thing to work. What is worse is that you can’t get any help.

I agree, none of the solutions that allow you to keep your Insteon hub are “just works”. I spent quite a bit of time ironing out several wrinkles getting my Homeseer configuration to work. But I found the support people very responsive to my questions, and the discussion forums filled with useful info and generally helpful participants.

A large number of companies and people in the home automation industry are paying a lot of attention to the Insteon fiasco (and that’s exactly what it is), because it damages market perception beyond damage that widely publicized hacks have already done. You will find many companies and people willing to help get you going, but, as you found (as I did), it’s not a trivial “just works” transition.

I’ve been very close to giving up entirely on Insteon and moving to a completely different platform. I just don’t know which that would be. I’m currently on Homeseer and will probably stay for the foreseeable future, but it hasn’t been easy, and a few things still don’t work (still can’t get the mobile app to show any devices).

xgrep – If you recently went with homeseer bc of the Insteon shutoff, curious if you considered Home Assistant as well, but went with Homeseer for some reason.

I first tried to run the Home Assistant virtual machine on an old version of VirtualBox on an old Mac Mini, but it wouldn’t run for a variety of reasons, and I didn’t have another small box that I could dedicate to it, nor did I want to buy one. I was able to get it to run find on a larger, more modern Mac running current VirtualBox (6.1), but I can’t dedicate that machine to this purpose. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have a reason not to run Home Assistant.

Works for me. you have to basically bring all your devices in on your homeseer and in the process wipe out the previous insteon configuration mostly. It helps if you understand how insteon works. But it does work fine

I am struggling with the acronyms and what connects to what. The instructions to Alexa connection I suspect since I am on original eco.

My red light is on solid on my Hub 2. I am a Home assistant user and a Nabu Casa subscriber. I can still control all Insteon devices even with Alexa. Thank you Home assistant I have around 45 Insteon devices the Home Assistaint community is the best thing that ever happened to DIY home automation.

My Insteon devices are working locally, but I can’t authenticate, and the user discussion forum is down.

Insteon was acquired by Nokia in 2022.

https://nokia.smartlabsinc.com/pages/customer-support

The owners of Insteon acquired the Nokia Smart Lighting division in 2021.

Emails were sent to customers today forwarding us/them to creditor receivership claims It only directs to a pdf so i can’t post that here. But did link in your website form a active claims site

Emails were sent to customers today forwarding us/them to creditor receivership claims It onlyhttps://fileaclaim.info/SmartLabs-ABC/ directs to a pdf so i can’t post that here. But did link in your website form a active claims site

Cost me a lot of money to have a locksmith get me in to my house on Friday when Insteon wouldn’t open my garage door. Not happy

I hooked up Home Assistant very quickly last night. Worked easy and the app is pretty solid. Just needed a spare laptop that I had lying around to act as my server…virtual box and a HA VDI.

Homeseer can control the non-pro insteon hub and some of the PLMs can used with the MNS plugin.

Down for me as well. Would be a crying shame to just end this for customers without some notice!

Just saw this looking up Home assistant to get my system back up running. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/insteon/ How nice that they let their customers know.

I returned from vacation to a dark house last night (Friday). I noticed that I couldn’t connect to my hub on Thursday and was anxious to get home and troubleshoot.

I reached out to Insteon support & no response. I checked Amazon & Smarthome for a new hub and noticed that almost all Insteon products are sold out.

I then ordered a bunch of Kasa Wi-Fi switches and plugs for overnight delivery. I’ll at least swap out the lamps so that they turn on & off on a daily schedule. I’ll take my time replacing the other Insteon bulbs, wall switches, outlets, micro modules, and outdoor switches. I had over 70 Insteon devices throughout my home. I’m a little pissed right now.

I now realize that I should have switched to Lutron Caseta years ago. It’s very responsive and reliable and is much better than Kasa, which constantly loses WiFi connectivity. Lutron, using RF, is faster and more reliable than Insteon ever was, despite using both powerline & RF.

Insteon did have a fuller line of products, including micro dimmers, I/O controllers, and open/close sensors, but for the bulk of what I need, Lutron just works.

I’m returning a bunch of Kasa and BroadLink devices.

I installed 1 Brilliant device, but at $400 for a single gang switch, it’s too pricey to have more than 2. I like the integration with Ring and built in camera, but it otherwise feels a bit novelty.

Sharing this for anyone looking for a viable alternative.

This is such a disgraceful exit from a company that’s been part the smart home industry for so long. Fortunately Insteon devices can still be added via the official Home Assistant integration, through ISY, and also via a community MQTT integration for Home Assistant that is available via Supervisor. I hope Kevin will explain how to do this for other Insteon users on your next show or soon after. For myself (an Insteon user too), I’ve been using it local only for around 5 years via two node.js apps that work with Hubitat. I’ll keep using the hub until I need to make a change to Insteon Scenes. From there I’ll have to choose between using the MQTT integration or moving to the ISY-994i that I just purchase off ebay while I could still get one. Feel free to reach out if you want any information that will help other Insteon users keep their equipment functional.

Hey Douglas, I have been using Insteon for probably close to 10 years now with very little to no interaction needed from me beyond adding new devices. I initially looked at ISY, not sure what MQTT is. Am I to infer from your comment that ISY going away? What do you need in terms of a hub to utilize MQTT? Also, what show are you referring to with Kevin. i would like to make sure I start following along. Thanks.

Sorry just realized what page I had landed on 🙂 I now know which show to watch, but all other questions still stand. Thanks.

HELP! I live in a 240 year old house and used Insteon to create 3 ways, etc. without having to rip up the plaster and lathe walls….I need the app though as I enjoyed some of the programming aspects available. WhT app will communicate with my hub?

I agree. It’s a very disappointing exit. A bit of notice would have been great! I was out of the country when they pulled the plug. Had I known, I would have swapped out at least a few devices to avoid my home being completely dark for 2 days. It’s going to take time for me to find suitable replacements for the 70+ Insteon devices that i have, including custom etched keypads and open/close sensors controlling closet lights.

Hi Yes, I am in same situation. What a bummer I have my whole house down ..Any suggestions on how to use Home assistance? do I need any hardware or is it all software related??

I’m an Insteon user too.

I’m planning to use a Raspberry PI and reconfigure the field devices to Home Assistant. But the only issue I have here is, most of the devices are buried above the ceiling and very difficult to access them to get the address of the devices.

Is there any way to retrieve the ID’s of the Insteon devices that are stored in Insteon Hub ? Thanks.

Yes – HomeAssistent will do this. I will connect to your Insteon hub, and retrieve all of the IDs. You’ll need to know the IP address of your Insteon hub, and the username / password (which are printed on the back label of the hub).

Can u guide me how can i retrieve the data’s from the Hub ? Thanks.

It’s not so much about retrieving the hub data, rather, it’s about getting something like Home Assistant (or other front end / control) up and running so you can control your devices again.

This is a good place to start with Home Assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/

It can run on a variety of different platforms. I’ve got it running in VMware under Windows 10.

It’s not plug and play, but the user community has a lot of useful info posted.

can you provide info/links on the alternatives you reference above (Home Assistant, ISY, MQTT, Supervisor)? My insteon Hub stopped working so i can’t control my devices via the app or Alexa. I can still use scenes via a programmed wall switch. thanks

My Insteon just died on Friday evening I cannot connect to the hub. The app doesn’t work cannot connect. I’ve been a loyal Insteon user for over 10years. I guess it’s time to find another company

Hello Douglas can you provide a forum and contact info for newbie’s like myself? My name is Adrienne.

Doug: I have over 100 insteon devices in my home and 85 scenes. I went with insteon because I did NOT want to be internet dependent! I had thought I could program ans store all info on the hub and that the internet was for communicating to other service and for back-up. Is it not be possible for Insteon to provide directions that enable the hub to be used for programming insteon device as well as storing the programs? I have also purchsed the ISY-994i BUT I am having difficulty getting started. Is there some place that has detailed instructions about initial set-up? And also some detailed examples of different scenes. Initializing devices the; have several devices placed in a scene; then set to go off & on at set times? (my most common scene) Is there even a consultant that could lead me through how to do this.

This is frustrating. I have 200+ Insteon devices in my home alone. 40+ dimmers etc. I guess it’s time to pull this hardware out. What’s a good replacement?

You don’t need to ditch the hardware! You just need a new front-end to run it all. I’m currently using HomeSeer and its better than the Insteon interface was to begin with. HomeSeer can be a program you run on a computer in the house that stays on, or it can be a dedicated black box (also sold by HomeSeer) that simply runs HomeSeer on your network. In either case, HomeSeer is a local server that can talk directly to your Insteon Hub in a completely cloud-independent manner. As mad as I am at Insteon that they handled things this way and treated their customers in this fashion, I still recognize the hardware side of it is top notch and superior to Z wave. So say you ditch your Insteon system and get something else that is yet again dependent on cloud services? Same thing can happen again. A lot of users on here are talking about using the ISY. Haven’t worked with that but it sounds like it may be harder to use. I got HomeSeer running on a Linux box in my house (but it also runs on Windows if you prefer) in about an hour. Thats with zero previous experience working with HomeSeer prior to last Friday night. I jumped for joy when I saw my hub come back to life and start commanding my devices again using HomeSeer. Had Alexa integration working again from the start. Then I spent the rest of the weekend going through a house full of devices and reprogramming them. You will have to factory reset your hub, and then factory reset every insteon device in your house to delete all the old Insteon data tables. Hope that helps, brother. You can download a free 30 day trial of HomeSeer and the Insteon plugin, and confirm you can make it work before you spend a single cent on it. Worth every penny once you get it going, as I too have thousands in my setup.

Good info, thank you. The Home Assistant home page as a warning not to factory reset your devices or they may not be recoverable, so maybe it’s a good idea not to reset them until you’re sure you are going to be using Homeseer. I’m not sure if that’s important or not, but just thought I would mention it.

Everything is running at a local level just fine I just added a switch to the hub manually with no plm or usb interface with Home assistant..picking up the changes besides picking up the old stuff and Nabu Casa pick it all up and put Alexa and Google back in the mix so my home and office are working as normal with a app if needed to run it. I am sure with time there are going to be many workarounds..

Kyle makes a really good point about the reset. My time with ISY was actually really easy – the first thing I did was let it read my entire Insteon network – connecting each of the links. It created a full listing of all of my Insteon devices and scenes in one list. The only issue was that none of my ‘friendly names’ came over. Once it was complete, I went room by room turning on dimmers and plugs and watched ISY show an ‘on’ status. Then I controlled the light from my computer to guarantee I was working with the right device and then renamed it. Doing this as a first step for all of my devices gave me a clean list. I then went through all of my ‘scenes’ and named them properly and deleted some that were created by the electrician when they installed the devices (some random programming at the switch. It was nice to have a clean listing.

That gets us to the second part of the process. All of my dimmers would flash red because they couldn’t speak to the Insteon HUB – which meant there were links in the switch that wouldn’t fire correctly. From there I went switch by switch doing a factor reset – the great thing is that from the ISY admin console you can ‘recover’ the device – so it pushes a clean list of links to the device and the flashing red light went away. This was a really great feature because I didn’t want to have to reprogram all 90+ devices and scenes.

I was connected to Alexa via the Insteon Hub – so the first thing I did was to deactivate the Insteon Skill in my Alexa App – and also all of the associated ‘discovered’ devices and scenes. This gave me a ‘clean slate’ in the Alexa App. From here there is an extra step in the My ISY Portal where you create a list of scenes and devices to ‘share’ with Alexa. This was a really brilliant next step because I was able to shield Alexa from the scenes that you create for Insteon Keypads that just clutter up that platform. I selected the devices and it allows you to type the spoken name for the device along with 3 alternatives. All of these are shared with Alexa when you do ‘discovery’ on the Alexa app. From there I rebuilt my ‘groups’ in Alexa (I use rooms) to put the devices in the proper rooms.

While this was a bad circumstance, I was able to use it to clean up my automation and moved to a better platfform. Frankly, I also don’t mind paying the less than $20 a year subscription for ISY – it seems to give me comfort that it will be around because I’m actually paying for it.

Nice Kyle Love it / I have been researching Homeseer and like it / did you have any links for the downloads ? And what’s a plug in ? Do I really need the hub if my computer is on 24/7 ? And I assume all the settings and scenes are stored on the computer?

Yes you still need the hub. HomeSeer will talk directly to the Insteon hub. From there the commands get relayed to your Insteon devices. So it is wall switch–>Insteon Hub–>LAN–>Computer running HomeSeer. You need to get on the HomeSeer web site, sign up for a My HomeSeer account and verify your email. THEN it will give you a link to download and install HomeSeer. Once up and running, you enable the Insteon plugin within HomeSeer. You enter in your Hub’s IP address. Printed on it’s bottom is a special username and password used to access the Hub directly. (Not your Insteon user/pass you had set up). Also, you enter in the default port 25105. Then restart your computer and restart HomeSeer. You now can communicate with your hub using HomeSeer. You really need to factory reset every Insteon device to add it and erase all the old Insteon data. None of it can be imported into HomeSeer. Once you add each device back through HomeSeer, you can enable the HomeSeer Alexa skill and start voice controlling everything again. And yes…for all this to work, the computer running HomeSeer must remain on 24/7.

For emergency access without resetting everything you can use home assistant, and Nabu Casa to get immediate access to your devices in their current state it’s a little bit more challenging to add new devices but you can but at least until you get the time to reset everything with homeseer you can use assistant to at least monitor with an app turn things off and on and gain Alexa and Google control back

Great…THANKS a miilon!!! Can you also use a moblie application??

It’s really a mess – they could have given the large userbase some warning instead of just abruptly pulling the plug on the servers. I’ve got everything back and running with Home Assistant installed and Alexa integration is easily done too with their home assistant cloud service – see the reddit insteon forums.

Well we now know wjy the interruption. Looking forward to weeks of swapping apps and possibly hardware. Oh fun …

There needs to be a class action lawsuit over this. This is unacceptable. These hotshots need to get it through their heads that they can’t pull stuff like this. I’m not an Insteon customer, but this is just wrong.

at least they could have been adults about it and warned us.. but this kinda of stuff is typical from them they never listened to their customers.. ever..

Yes, their customer communication efforts were nil.

In the least, perhaps those users posting here should contact the SmartLab guys, starting with Linkedin. Also, I am not on FB, but is there a group for Insteon? And contacting some form of media outlet could help bring these deserting guys to the forefront and into the public’s eye.

If that does not make enough waves, I would consider helping to get a class action started.

u cant sue nothing they are gone… and have taken the hide under a rock approach..I am sure we will see a BK announced or any assets which i doubt exist moved over seas as they pulled the plug a year ago just didn’t tell anyone.. until the server went dark last Friday. probably couldn’t pay the electric bill

“they pulled the plug a year ago…”

I received a sale email from Smarthome about a month ago. If they were already planning to abandon ship while still selling hardware dependent on those servers, that is fraud.

I have over 130 insteon devices in my home. I bought it so I could have local control and did NOT require the internet for local scheduling. Is there a way to disconnect the hub from the internet making it work as a stand alone controller / programmer /user interface enabling it to accept schedue changes without going back to the insteon servers??

I think people are working on better compatibility i unfortunately I do not have a plm, or a usb stick But can add things like sensors manually, but have no way to set timers on them as of now looks like its a waiting game. I used Home assistant and nabu casa to gain control and add back Alexa google and can use the workaround to control stuff but programming the devices not so good right now. I had been trying to get a plm for some time.. or a usb interface but they been gone for awhile Good Luck

Yep, mine is down also. What a pain, does this mean I’ll have to fork out m9re money to replace all my modules and hub. Probably.

Another shameful failure in IoT and another reason Matter was designed as local first.

Dependence on a cloud–or a proprietary and / or niche application layer–are some of the worst “compromises” in all of IoT.

It’s products & companies like Insteon that will set back consumer trust (and for all smart home companies, massive revenue) for a very long time.

Thank you, Stacey, for taking the time to reach out and try to get an answer for so many Insteon users. This story deserves a lot of attention.

Many Insteon customers are trying to find out what went wrong at the subreddit; some even have traveled to Insteon’s HQ office! Locked & closed, though it is Easter weekend.

https://www.reddit.com/r/insteon/

ZIPITYZ: Perhaps some of us do NOT want to be IOT dependent and are NOT of the “sharing” generation that trusts they will not be ripped off. Being a “cranky old man” I perfer to rely on myself and not IOT which is buggy and fraught with privacy and security concerns.

…the name of the website you are browsing is “staceyonIOT.com”, mate. What exactly do you think is being discussed here?

Plenty of hardwired IoT switches can be manually controlled—if you read more articles on this website, you might’ve understood that. You are never “dependent” on anything: just…walk over and hit the switch. Is that what you’re upset about?

The younger generation understands independence better than the older one, it seems..

Well…replacing an Insteon system is far more of a big deal than, say, replacing a smart toaster or a smart thermostat. For many users, like me, Insteon is an extensive system wired in junction boxes thought the house. That you don’t just trash at the drop of the hat. Luckily companies like HomeSeer can pick up the slack where Insteon dropped the ball and abanoned an entire customer base. HomeSeer has my system back up and running 100%, and giving two middle fingers to companies like Insteon, that treat customers like this. In other news…just look what Johnson Controls has done the last few weeks to everyone who owns the expensive Glas Thermostat. Yet another example of how to diminish consumer confidence in IoT companies.

I had been wondering about Insteon for a while. If they had opened the standard early on, it would have worked. All the X10 users could have moved right in. I have an ISY 994 which integrates with Home Assistant and it is rock solid. As Instean devices fail, I replace with ZWave devices. There should be lot’s of Insteon gear on EBay for a few years.

We need open smart home devices, stop thinking you can close loop your ‘faithful’ customers with these bad systems and just make the components that we need and want and WE WILL BUILD OUR OWN SYSTEMS!!! You obviously can not be trusted to stick around… Damn American greedy companies…

Not a good solution for non coders

A most bizarre way to terminate a business. That being the case, this quote comes to mind …

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. ” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, stated by Sherlock Holmes

Insteon was virtually the only non-proprietary solution “back in the day”… Control4 and others were out there but you needed to be certified to purchase and install. As a result we have a lot of Insteon products in the house. I have always been weary of single-source solutions and, later, cloud solutions so I went with HomeSeer which supports Insteon, Z-Wave and many other technologies on a local server. What I’ve learned over the years was that Insteon is the least reliable (both hardware and communications), and there was basically no support except through the community… so good riddance as far as I’m concerned. Their way of exiting the industry shows the true nature of the company. Thank you for the detailed follow-up.

The real lesson for consumers is that proprietary devices will always be held hostage by the OEM. Remember the Wink fiasco.

Yet another example of why you should never rely on “cloud” services for anything other than backup storage.

Yeah. My stuff is down too. Probably going to start phasing Insteon out – sigh. This episode has made me appreciate planning for offline and probably MQTT. All this cloud stuff made me lazy – too easy to setup – until it doesn’t work.

I am not a techie and found this thread by Google search. All of the lights in my house are controlled by Insteon devices, so I would greatly appreciate assistance (in layman’s terms) gaining local control of my 2245-222 hub. I tried using the Homeseer app as one user suggested but cannot connect to the hub. I do not have a PLM (or a desktop computer for that matter).

Ironically, I was recently touting the virtues of Insteon and how my Systems were working so well. So much for that. Now I need to find an alternative. Z-Wave looks promising. I hesitate to use a Samsung system as I have had bad luck with their products. I ordered an Aeotec hub as a start. Any comments?

It seems likely the servers are gone since my account is locked out and my hub is red after network reset. This may seem like a real longshot, but is there a chance the server functionality could be rehosted based on existing known functionality?

The parent company could release server information that would users “roll their own”, if the company gave a darn about customers.

I have a bunch of Insteon devices, and when I realized they were probably not coming back, I finally took the plunge and looked around at internal ways to control them. Had been wanting to do that for a while. Anyway, Home Assistant is definitely possible! I installed their OS image on a Pi 2 and was controlling my Insteon devices in less than an hour.

HomeSeer has probably the best Insteon support. No programming or loops to jump through. Just enable the Insteon plugin and add your devices. You get access to scenes and device linking. You can use the HomeSeer software on a Windows PC, Linux, or purchase a HomeSeer hub. System does not use the cloud, it’s all locally managed.

Also, every Insteon product in the SmartHome online store (also owned by SmartLabs) is shown as Sold Out. 🤔

I was wondering what happened to Insteon. They could have been a great success if they had opened up the protocol. All the X10 users would come right on board. My Insteon system is running on an ISY994 that is controlled by Home Assistant just fine. I do add new devices on the ZWave network and replace broken Insteon with ZWave. Should be lots of cheap Insteon devices on EBay.

If they are gone this is a horrible way to go not putting in place an alternative. There is a safety issue here as well. Smoke Bridge, lighting, water sensors, door sensors to name a few. I have been with Insteon since 2008 I think and rely on all there products. Even the lights in parts of my home are not hard wired to a switch, all Insteon. Now what? Who if anyone will pick them up or buy them. Meanwhile, we sit here waiting. And thanks for the information I actually thought my hub burned out again I was looking to replace that resistor that I did once before that then worked for a few months. I started to take it apart but this time figured I just call Insteon and get it migrated to a new hub. Little did I know….

I got my current hub and devices back up also integrated back into alexa and google and able to monitor what i have with just a windows 11 pc VM running Home Assistant and Nabu Casa Since much of insteon was local you can still add sensors and who knows what else for now. Just DO NOT RESET YOUR HUB

I’ve been thinking about this whole not resetting your devices/hub thing I keep hearing people mention. A real permanent solution requires having the ability to factory reset/program new devices. You need a system that is capable of programming new Insteon links, adding new devices if/when existing ones fail. If Nabu Casa and Home Assistant are purely reliant on reading and commanding Insteon tables/links that have already been programmed, then these are not long term reliable solutions. So to me, it looks like ISY and HomeSeer are really the only two real solutions at the moment. My entire setup, including the Hub, got a factory reset after I realized Insteon wasn’t coming back. Each device was added back, and individually programmed to do what I need it to do, using HomeSeer’s Insteon plugin.

Does HomeSeer give you the ability to program individual Insteon devices (like changing the dimming level of a dimmer, the ramp level for dimming, the initial on level, …)?

Yes but it give you and emergency path to at least monitor and regain Alexa\google integration without a plm or usb interface. Until you have the time to reprogram an entire house Not sure if homeseer can work without the plm or usb that are now impossible to find Isy needs a serial

I’ve been connected to SmartHome for about 20 years. I started with X-10, then migrated to Insteon. No surprise in lack of communication with Insteon. They promised the moon for the new app’s feature list several years ago, and after 2+ years developing, gave us crap. And AFAIK made almost no improvements after release. I continued to use the old app, but of course now it can’t connect to the server.

My Insteon Hub scense are still working. But, my bedtime scene is not timed and so requires a manual switch to On. So, the past two nights I have to go around the house and manually set 9 wall switch controllers. Fun.

The only positive for me is, I have a list of $400 worth of stuff I was getting ready to order.

Not that it would do much good, but I plan to contact some of the SmartLab guys on LinkedIn and ask why no final communication. There are likely many advanced users (me) who could’ve got together and taken over the servers. For shame.

And it IS a shame.

Any information posted on the other alternatives mentioned in some of the comments above would be immensely appreciated by me and likely many others.

Just filled my shopping cart with all the components to replace my Insteon system. I knew the day would come as the writing has been on the wall. Prior outages and several broken Insteon devices pushed me to the brink, but this was the tipping point.

This was indeed a betrayal of a dedicated following of long-time users by Smarthome/Insteon. The writing has been on the wall for some time but we remained optimistic. May I reinforce a reference to Universal Devices’ ISY994 and Polisy devices. They have long supported Insteon and continue to do so. Their support is considerably more robust and wide-ranging. The only consideration will be acquiring a PLM device to facilitate Insteon signal transmission via powerline and RF. These are available on Ebay, albeit at hitherto unheard of prices. This will keep your investment running, if not provide for an affordable expansion.

Another reason companies like Amazon and smart bulbs with Alexa by the way to go

I started using Insteon products a few years ago, but their technology was very unreliable and slow and expensive. I scrapped it all recently and started again with simper, cheaper platform. It’s much, much better.

Insteon could have gone places if they had maintained a technical focus, and offered product evolution. However, it really seemed like they had no real plans to continue with this product line long-term.

I wrote to them about the fundamental shortcomings of the system, but got no reply.

I installed HomeAssistant over the weekend. It was able to connect to my Insteon hub and pull down the full set of devices. I had to figure out the location of each device, just a matter of turning then on and finding the entry in the device list. There is a iphone/Android phone all for control. And… they have a subscription cloud service that works with Alexa and Google.

I’m ticked off at Insteon for the way they exited. But I’m very happy with HomeAssistant.

I don’t know if it is possible, but this reminds me of other cases where a class action Lawsuit solved the problem of a company not fulfilling their obligations. I think most people would just want the servers be maintained. People bought this stuff as late as February. Not just local programed switches…smart switches!. Since, there is another company that was formed it may be possible.

Another motivating factor could be people using social medial to let the people at Nokia lighting and the possible customers know what they might be getting into. Not a good way to launch a new company… bad word of mouth!

My low-voltage LED landscape lights are currently by an Insteon smart plug in the transformers aluminum enclosure. Does anyone now make a non-RF smart plug?

Check out the Lutron outdoor smart plug, PD-15out-BL

“ Does anyone now make a non-RF smart plug?”

That’s a tough one!

I assume your issue is that the aluminum enclosure is blocking radio frequency signals from most devices, including Wi-Fi, Zigbee, etc. Insteon was one of the few protocols which gave you the option of transmitting over powerline.

What a lot of people do in this kind of situation is locate the radio device in a plastic box near the metal enclosure and then run cable from it into the metal enclosure. That can work quite well, but of course it depends on the details of your set up.

Also, depending on how the wires are run, you may be able to move even further upstream from the metal enclosure, essentially the same as putting a regular dumb switch at some more convenient location for it. Only you would use a smart switch.

But if this is something like a garden installation where there is no other power and you don’t want to run cable all the way back to the house, there aren’t a lot of options.

You can see if USwitch has a model that would work for you, but you do need to be able to run ethernet cable to it, and again, I don’t know if that fits what you’re trying to do. Also it’s a very expensive device, about $150 per relay.

I’m trying to think if elk has something, but I don’t think they have anything low-voltage. They’re really designed for outdoor security systems and more of their stuff is for high-voltage. Gate controls and big floodlights and that kind of thing. Plus, even more expensive than Uswitch.

Maybe ask your question in the Reddit Insteon subforum, i’m sure there will be other people with the same question.

If it was me, I would probably just mount the radio device outside the metal enclosure, if that’s the issue. That would give you a lot more options, including Wi-Fi devices like Shelly.

I had this originally X10 … we wanted to use the echo controller so insteon was perfect. X10 SUFF IS STILL AVAILABLE.

I use a Ring outdoor smart plug to control my low voltage landscape and pool lighting, and it has worked great for nearly a year. you will need the Ring bridge…

https://smile.amazon.com/Ring-Outdoor-Smart-Plug/dp/B08KSJ56WR/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=ring+outdoor+smart+plug&qid=1650314755&sr=8-1

Are the outlets on the Ring plug rain proof?

I’mEverSoPissed!!! I hope each of these (former) Insteon Execs are forever tainted by this disgraceful failure to provide even a base level of support for their consumer base. Instead of planned repairs, I’m now forced to tear out all ceiling fan controllers (18ft up the ladder for each, anyone?) and the related wired-in devices.

Although it does work, I can’t rely on HomeAssistant due to an aging hub that can’t be reconfigured once it goes dead.

We’re giving up on home automation until the industry can get their act together and agree on an interop standard…..maybe like USB is to PC’s…..what a novel concept!…8oP

I outfit my new home entirely with Insteon devices (dimmers, switches and smart plugs). I was running it all with Alexa via the Insteon Hub. I have 80 wired devices and was running a couple dozen schedules and scenes. This outage was a big deal. We even purposely concealed switches in closets because we didn’t want them to be seen in our very modern home. Luckily I had purchased a Universal Device ISY994i and the Insteon PLM and had never integrated them into my stack. I spent Saturday migrating everything over to ISY (which was a fairly easy process since it was able to read all of the devices and scenes in one read with their utility. I then spend a few hours updating the common name of each device. The most difficult part of the process was finding a browser in my home where I could still run IE11 and Java (I hope they get the admin console updated to something more current soon).

I subscribed to the annual ISY account to re-connect to Alexa and now my home is running smoothly again. I’m sorry to hear that Insteon may be no longer and certainly do not agree with the way they just ‘went silent’ on all of their customers. I have been using Insteon for almost 20 years and it has been a very solid product.

You might think about switching it over to Shelly. They have some small modules that can control LV.

Although one can fault Insteon for relying on a cloud infrastructure, it’s worth noting that they _long_ preceded the idea of the cloud. They date back to the previous millennium. Their original products only worked via RS-232 and (eventually) USB. That’s a lot of work to set up, and required a local server of some kind.

Years ago I switched from X10 to Insteon and have 2 hubs that control more than a dozen lamp modules. I hate to set up another new system but if I have to is there anything out there that works with the Lamp Dimmer #2457D2 module?

Hi ‎@gigastacey – FYI, HomeSeer can talk directly to the Insteon hub. That allows Insteon hub users to control their system using our app or using Alexa or Google Home devices. It’s fairly simple to set up. They would need a HomeSeer hub (HomeTroller) and the Insteon software plugin. More information about the plugin can be found here: https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/hs4-products/hs4-plugins/lighting-primary-technology-plug-ins-aa/mns-insteon-mnsandler/1537171-getting-started-with-the-mns-insteon-plugin

Here’s the problem with what was done by Insteon and I hope the rest of the smart home community can learn from this: For many thousands of users, Insteon means more than just a smart light bulb or maybe a smart thermostat. In my case, it is a house full of devices…wired in switches in every junction box. Relays that turn on fireplace gas valves. Controllers for ceiling fans and wired in wall keypads for controlling them. It’s obviously a much bigger deal than, say, replacing a smart toaster or coffee pot! Or a smart timer for a sprinkler system controller. Or a doorbell camera. Things you can easily replace one by one, here and there as time goes on. But a wired-in system that becomes part of your home’s 110V system…you don’t just suddenly throw that away! Of course you can still locally turn lights on and off physically just like a century ago. But you have no way to program or do anything more with the Insteon devices. THANK GOD there exists workarounds like HomeSeer. Last week when I saw Insteon go dark, it was obvious it wasn’t coming back. I deployed a HomeSeer server in our home (it really isn’t that hard), and now my Insteon system is up and running as before with better than previous performance. Hardware wise, Insteon was, and still is, an amazing technology. Once put into place, it works very well, and the only thing that needs to evolve/be supported after that is whatever smart system is in place to control it. My point being here…it is WHOLLY unacceptable for smart home technologies that are more extensively wired into a customer’s home…to be suddenly terminated in this fashion. I spent many hours wiring in all my Insteon devices. My advice to any other smart home enthusiast…for extensively wired in systems with lots of devices…just make sure it can at least be supported by a home automation server platform like HomeSeer, or ISY that runs locally in the house on your network. Then the value of your expensive setup is not entirely at the mercy of a company’s cloud services that they can shut off at the flick of a switch.

I split my house half zwave half insteon… insteon sensors were limited and the new ones a joke, their ability to make a simple only off timer on the the Light switch was a dismal failure and they never did try to fix it. Insteon was 10 times better at communication with each device so much faster than zwave. anyway that’s over for now.. but we do get to keep existing setups.. for as long as we like. So i only have half the house to worry about, i have it up and running again ( it never stopped ) just regained control with home assistant.. and got alexa/google back on board.. will wait for the new ( Matter specification be adopted to decide what todo ) https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22982166/matter-smart-home-standard-postponed-fall-2022

I completely agree with your point. I just build a new home and all of my switches and plugs are wired-in Insteon devices. I was able to jump over to ISY as my controller which reestablished my connection to Alexa. Frankly, I like the ISY interface much better than the Insteon Hub. My only issue with ISY was that I had to find a computer that I was able to run IE 11 on because the admin hub requires Java. I hope that Universal Devices updates this soon so that it runs on more modern browsers. I hope that someone will purchase the Insteon device business to keep this great platform in play.

Thank you for this article, Stacey. So far, yours is the only information i have found. My Nokia Smart Lighting bridge is disabled. My account is also disabled. I have several of the new devices introduced recently when Nokia Smart Lighting was launched and I integrated them with Alexa commands, groups, and routines, which now no longer work. This is a shame because these are high quality products on all levels. I’m hoping a solution exists for Alexa.

I just noticed that the Home Assistance website has a notice that Insteon has shut down, and warns to NOT factory reset devices because they will not be recoverable.

Stacy, you mentioned: “Lilleness is a former executive at Nokia who lives in Seattle and invested $7.3 million in the Smartlabs business before taking on his leadership role at the company.” This is not correct. About $5.9M of a preferred Class A shares were converted from existing loan-holders and new paid in capital of $1,4M (19%), this was Rob and his partner’s money. There is an SEC filing from June 5, 2017 that details this.

All my Insteon devices are still working, but I have a Hub Pro with HomeKit.

That’s what they were banking on… a better faster more responsive system but they were arrogant with lousy support that ate them alive.

Now with Matter on the horizon they were left in the dust as they failed to get the message of a faster more reliable platform over zwave wifi and zigby

Then they pissed off their base with no communication and bite dust if you don’t like some of our crappy stuff IE sensors

They will never come back

Very bummed out to read this. I have been trying to figure out what was going on with my hub since Saturday! I originally thought the hub went bad as I had similar problems about a year ago. After contacting SmartLabs, the company actually programmed a new hub and sent it free of charge. Please keep us informed of any news!

I’m glad people have found so many alternate home servers that work for them. But I know from experience that power line modems don’t last forever; and replacements are already disappearing. I believe the best plan going forward is to use your server of choice and replace Insteon devices with other kinds as they go bad or something better comes along. I think replacing my 60+ devices all at once would bust my budget. That’s my plan, what do you all think?

A couple of months ago I had a motion detector acting up. I tried to purchase a new one. Out of stock. I called tech support and I was informed that they wouldn’t be offering them anymore. I couldn’t believe it. I was so upset that I wrote an email to the owner. I asked him if he was giving up. I stated that he should be expanding into the home security arena instead of retreating. I suggested that if income was an issue start a subscription program. If that would help keep them afloat and product invention, I would be in favor of it. For the past year Insteon was dropping products with no alternatives. I was told it was a supply chain issue. BS. I really like the Insteon products and the way they communicate distant areas through power lines. I travel a lot and used the Insteon system to monitor my home. I am away and now my house is unmonitored. Glad the weather is warmer at home. I hope some other company will buy them and bring them back to life. I will be looking into alternative systems if Insteon doesn’t rise from the dead.

You’d think that if they were going out of business, the powers that were at Insteon could have open sourced their software letting their customers have a fighting chance.

You would think. Unless there was some kind of agenda behind this … (Just wondering out loud.)

they have been dead for over 3 years.. the corpse finally rotted away. They lacked innovation, bad software and an unbearable support. Then add Covid and supply chain issues they simply ran out of money. The death nail came when the power company came and pulled the off switch for non payment.

Just a FYI I have been able to add a Dimmer and Sensor to the hub manually with Home assistant picking up the changes done at a manual hub switch level, Alexa pick up the new addition immediately. No Insteon Cloud needed to add devices or remove all done at hardware level. The only thing i have not figured out is how to set timers.. I am sure there is a way All of this with no plm or usb interface This tell me that those who hard reset have hope to restore their setup. I have a new hub that i am going to try to bring on board and see.. its all tinker time.. but now i need not worry about my home or office it is under control

Another Insteon hub user here too. Although not a large Insteon install here, this is still a PITA. I’ve loaded up OpenHAB, connected to the hub and imported the ‘Things’. It’s looking like a rather steep learning curve.

On the bright side, my old X10 stuff is still humming along. Local oversight is critical in any automation environment.

Anyone have an idea what will happen to the IP? I have done two homes now with insteon, use a isy994 so the outage doesn’t effect me, however not being able to buy new devices does. I’ve had nothing but good things to say in my 100+ device home. The devices don’t fail, they are instant. So much better than zwave which I struggled to get anything to communicate to each other and gave up on.

Homeseer website has a headline “ We can bring your Insteon hub back to life”

Wow, that’s pretty shady to to not give a heads up to its large customers base and just pull the plug on all its users without offering suggested alternatives. It no wonder that Lilleness is hiding his ties to Insteon on LinkedIn, but this is not the behavior you’d expect from a CEO.

Like many other users, I’ve had to find an alternative, and since I had a Raspberry Pi4 hanging around, I decided to give the Home Assistant software a shot and followed their instructions: https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/ It’s actually pretty straight forward and I now have my own server up and running. After the installation, it took about an hour for it to discover all my devices, but sure enough, I’m back in control of my devices. The one area which had me a little confused was when I was trying to connect Home Assistant to my Insteon Hub, it kept on failing to connect until I figured out that the username and password its looking for is not the one you use when login on to Insteon, but rather the one that is printed on the underside of the Insteon hub…

I thought my hub had died again until I tried to email Insteon and never got anything back. I have 25 hard wired switches for lights and dimmers.

What are the alternatives that possibly exist that we can migrate to?

See the post on April 19, 2022 at 1:59 pm – spot on – highly recommended! I went the Windows / VMware route following these installation instructions: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/installing-home-assistant-on-vmware-workstation-16/316043 And then went back to the link in the previously mentioned post to quickly and easily configure my schedules.

I jsut saw a post on the Universal Devices Forum that says they are looking to buy the IP and get the cloud servers so they an power things back up while they work to offer a migration platform to thier cloud/ controller.

Let’s just say we get home seer to work… or some other option. What about when the switches die? Because I bought my house with Insteon in place and a lot of the switches are at the end of their life. So I need to Swap them. Clearly the hardware is no longer available. What is the suggested work around? I probably have 75 switches in my home.

The short answer is choose a hub/server now that can work with both Insteon and other protocols to bring your Insteon devices into a different app. So Homeseer, Home Assistant, maybe Hubitat or HOOBS. That lets you use your existing Insteon devices with a different home automation platform so you can make new rules and schedules. The exact features and hardware required will vary, so you’ll need to do some research to figure out what will work best for you.

Then as individual Insteon switches die over time, replace them with switches of a different protocol that work with the new app/platform you’re using. If you choose Homeseer, that might be Zwave. If you choose HOOBS, that will probably be HomeKit. But again the choices will vary depending on the platform you choose.

So there’s a lot of research to do and different things will work for different people. But there are some options out there if you’re willing to do the research to figure it all out.

I would suggest visiting the Reddit subforum on Insteon to get detailed help with any specific project as this particular site’s comment section isn’t really set up for that kind of discussion.

The nice thing about HomeSeer (or any technology agnostic solution) is that you swap out a failed device with another from another technology such as Z-Wave… the only caveat is that if you have Insteon devices linked to other devices directly, you will have to move those relationships into HomeSeer. For example, if you have two Insteon dimmers directly link to work like a 3-way switch, you’ll have to emulate that in HomeSeer with events.

I use the Insteon PLM and the HomeSeer SmartStick+ to control my Insteon and Z-Wave devices and using HomeSeer I can program whatever I want seamlessly. There are some issues such as delays since the messaging has to go through the HomeSeer server, but at least it works.

Just wait. This is happening with everything. Especially vehicles. There is a lot to be said about simplicity. Going to work through home assistant today.

It seems that are alternatives to switching to a different product line other than Insteon (Z-Wave, etc…). I saw in some of these posts that a “HomeSeer HomeTroller Plus Smart Home Hub” might be a suitable addition that would control the Insteon Hub. Seems complicated though. You need a HomeTroller AND the Insteon hub? Does the HomeSeer Hub allow remote access via the internet? Of course, replacement of failed Insteon products would still be an issue as they are presently not selling anything.

You still need the original Insteon hub because Insteon uses its own proprietary communication protocol, and you need an Insteon device to have a radio that can communicate with your other Insteon devices.

The add-ons that are being suggested (Homeseer, home assistant, hoobs, Hubitat, etc.) have the ability to talk to an insteon hub using a nonproprietary protocol, telnet, ethernet, something like that. But they can’t talk directly to an insteon light switch. They don’t have the right radio.

So with the insteon cloud gone, adding one of these other platforms will let the Insteon hub send over information to that platform and that platform can then bring it into its own app so now you can add new schedules and rules. (The exact features will vary by platform.) and that platform can send requests back over to the original Insteon hub which it will then pass along to the various Insteon Devices.

If you’re familiar with a Philips hue bridge, the setup is similar. The hue bridge uses local ethernet for all of its integrations, but talks to its own bulbs via Zigbee. The difference is that Phillips is using a standard third-party protocol, Zigbee, rather than something proprietary like Insteon did.

All of this means that whatever you are adding to your setup you are just adding in order to get an app that works again and the ability to talk to your existing Insteon hub. You are not replacing that hub because nothing else has the right radio to talk to the Insteon switches.

So not only do you need hubs of two different brands now to get app control again: it’s important to understand that one day when your Insteon hub does die, there’s no replacement for it. Your new hub won’t be able to talk to the insteon switches once there’s no more Insteon hub. So part of your long-term planning should be what do you want to do about the fact that your system will be dependent on a part for which there is no replacement?

If you’ve added on one of the other platforms and an individual Insteon switch dies, you’ll be able to replace that with a switch of a different protocol that works with your new platform. Probably Zwave for home assistant and HomeKit for Hoobs, for example.

But if you add on one of the other platforms and the Insteon hub dies, that’s the end of all communication with all your insteon devices.

This is why some people are requesting that insteon release the information on its proprietary protocols so that some other engineering company might be able to manufacture an eventual replacement hub. But that’s been pretty rare historically in similar situations. So we will just have to wait and see what happens on that idea.

Thanks for the info. My Insteon Hubs were still working locally even after the shutdown (although I could not communicate with them) until just the other day when the scenes stopped working altogether. I agree that when my Insteon Hub(s) finally die I’ll be stuck even if I get a Hub controller. I think I’ll just switch to a Z-Wave Hub and devices, there seem to be a lot of choices. I used to have a house with several Insteon devices and scenes but we sold it last year (after removing most of the devices) and now I don’t have that many Insteon devices anyway. The nice thing was I had two Hubs, one in our condo in Vermont and one in our apartment in California and I could monitor and control both from anywhere. I assume I will have the same type of control with another platform. Thanks again.

Smart labs. Just dropped a copy of its bankruptcy notice.

Has anyone figured out a way to program individual insteon devices without the Insteon app? Things like controlling the dimming rate, ramping level, brightness of the brightness LEDs on dimmers, …

You can do some of that with Indigo and a PLM.

What a bunch of crap, as usual. SmartLabs, Inc. assigns everything to “SmartLabs (ABC)” for liquidation. So, they created a “shell” company to liquidate whatever assets they have left. If the IP is still somehow intact, another company could possibly purchase the IP.

However, I see no reason to do any future business with anything related to Insteon. For now, I plan to move my Insteon devices over to HomeSeer or HomeAssistant, and be done with it until the dust settles with Matter devices.

Beyond moving off Insteon, I plan to follow the career progress of the executives who dumped and ghosted us, and avoid doing business with any company that hires them. And I will write reviews of those companies to warn potential customers of the risk. Sure they’ll be getting golden parachutes, but they need to be locked out of future rewards.

Revenge is hard on the soul let it go. They will get their due…

I feel that I’m doing the community a service by helping to keep companies managed by honest people.

Insteon posts “Important Message” on 2022-04-21: https://www.insteon.com/news2022

Too little, too late. Don’t blame the pandemic – what a cop-out. The supply chain doesn’t affect efforts to improve software. The “new” Insteon app was an abomination. Nearly all customers complained about the same shortcomings and user interface. Also, no apology in that message for bailing “in the middle of the night” without any warning to customers whatsoever. And now they’re still looking for a buyer. That is not going to happen. The technology was way ahead of its time and was quite decent. But, with Zwave, Zigbee and others in the market now in a big way, and with Matter now in place – at least in theory, it doesn’t make sense for any company to invest money in acquiring Insteon IP. The sensible and “humane” thing to do is to open-source the software and (possibly) hardware design and post it on Github (or other repository.)

X10 did that years ago. Can still by product and home hub still works.

I tried to install Insteon on Home Assistant, but seem to keep getting a “failed to connect” error message when trying to setup with the Hub and I know my credentials and IP are correct. Anyone else seeing this issue?

are u using the password and user name on back of hub

I tried that as well as the one I had previously reset it to and it didn’t work for HA. I tested going to directly to the IP:Port and using my credentials there and it was totally fine which is why I’m confident it’s not a problem there. Just seems like HA isn’t liking it for some reason…

u toasted it with a hard reset no longer HA compatible move on to homeseer if you have a plm

It’s working! Turned out being a networking issue with the docker image. Insteon hub and credentials were all fine.

WOW! This was a shocker. I visited the forum today because I got the notice in the mail today that SMARTLABS,inc. is being liquidated.

I never had any issues since this calamity happened, but now I know why.

I own and have installed about (20) Insteon devices and about (20) X10 devices connected to my Universal Devices ISY hub. As recently as January i purchased (5) insteon switches. I hesitated buying the Insteon hub for my system because I did not it would work with my X10 devices. Now I am glad I didn’t.

I have been using X10 for about 20 years and I just wanted more control so I added the ISY controller and the Insteon switches.

The insteon web site is back up with a press release and explanation. The were foreclosed upon and are still hoping for a buyer to resurrect the technology

If Insteon web site is up how do I “awaken” my hub; or should I ask, am I able to? Or is it just the web site that’s up but not the server?

Ron, the website and the cloud servers are two different beasts. I went the way of https://www.home-assistant.io/ under VMWare on Windows. Slight learning curve and I still want to enhance the interface, but we’re all good now. Everything is under control!

Thank you. I’m a senior who studied Econ so as far as tech goes I’m a user. This is very helpful Jason. I bot a house full of Insteon run by a Cortexa server. That firm went away so I installed the Hub. Now this. Thank you very much. Ron

If you hit any roadblocks Ron, let us know and we’ll see if we can get you over the hump.

I’m now running homeseer on a raspberry pi and my insteon home of 40 devices is back up and running and working with alexa. It’s actually more powerful than the hub was.

Which Alexa skill did you use?

I am wondering if anyone has compiled or found a comprehensive list of possible paths to take at this point. I started with X-10 more than 20 years ago. Insteon was like a Godsend compared to X-10; so much better switches and overall better system reliability.

I love the Insteon dimmer switches and would hate to give them up. What’s the best way to make a good comparison between Homeseer, Hame Assistant, etc.? I am a software developer of 30+ years and have no problem running (another) virtual machine as necessary or putting together a Raspberry Pi. But, I am having a bit of trouble deciding which way to go here.

Any help on this subject is of course greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Jeff, my path was similar to yours although my career was in electrical, instrumentation and control (relays, pneumatics and analogue first, then digital).

After trying OpenHAB (which to me was a really steep learning curve), I tried Home Assistant in VMware on Windows. It all went pretty smooth and I’m liking the result.

Thanks, Jason. I was slightly leaning in the direction of HA, so I think I’ll give it a whirl.

Does anyone have any experience with the Nokia SmartLabs switches and outlets? I beta tested them and have a bunch installed from the test and that I purchased afterwards. They’re the best I’ve ever used on several levels. I know that they’re based on Insteon but am not sure if they’re identical. They require a Nokia Bridge, which may be a hub, and the Nokia Smart Lighting app. At the time I installed them, I couldn’t use the Insteon app but am hoping thatI can use one of the solutions that everyone is so helpful with here.

I haven’t seen much better than the discussions on this topic, but I’ll say that the best solution depends a lot on your situation and expectations for the future.

* If you have an extensive Insteon configuration that would cost a lot to replace, then you should consider a Homeseer, Home Assistant, or Universal Devices (ISY994) solution. This would also apply if you have specific Insteon devices that can’t easily be replaced by products from other “ecosystems”. I have such a device (a “SocketLinc” dimmer socket) that I don’t want to replace with a plug-in dimmer due to small children in the house.

* Whether you choose Homeseer, Home Assistant, or ISY994 will depend on your budget and tolerance for technical involvement. I had intended to use a Home Assistant vdi, but it wouldn’t run on the old version of VirtualBox that I have installed on an old Mac Mini, and my only spare small PC was too small to run anything other than Homeseer.

* If you decide to go with a new home automation platform, I strongly believe that you should avoid anything that requires a cloud-based server to run unless it’s from a large, solid company that you can count on being around for a very long time. That would include Apple, Google, Samsung, and maybe one or two others, but would not have included Insteon, because … look what happens when “capital managers” are making strategic decisions and prioritize their compensation over your house. This sadly rules out a lot of other otherwise-excellent products and platforms.

My concern with this logic is that the company may be large and be around for a long time, but that doesn’t mean any individual product line will be.

For example, Samsung is one of the largest companies in the world, but drops products from time to time.

In 2018, they did a dual logo home automation hub with ADT (another large company) which was supposed to specifically be for security purposes, but combined with home automation. It ran with the same smartthings app as their regular home automation platform, but used a unique proprietary radio, so that the security sensors could only be used with the dual logo hub, not with any other smartthings hub or any other ADT panel.

And… within two years, the two companies had decided to kill the line. ADT had gone ahead and bought its own home automation company (now called blue by ADT) for DIY customers. And Samsung across-the-board seem to be trying to limit the number of different incompatible hub models they had.

In any case, customers were only given about 60 days notice that their dual logo security systems would no longer function. There was a buyback/refund program to help ease the pain, but there was still a lot of pain.

And Google has famously abandoned a number of projects over the years. Remember Google’s DIY security system? It went through a few name changes, and at the time it was killed, just under three years after introduction, it was called “nest secure.“ it had a lot of good things, in particular it had a really nice feature on its sensors where you could temporally turn them off on the sensor itself, like if you needed to open the back door to let the dog out. But it ended up just not being able to compete with the ring security system and they killed it.

Iris was another home automation platform from a big company, Lowe’s, that was killed after a few years.

So the size of the company doesn’t protect you. Really, nothing does, unless the company offers a contract that includes a guaranteed service clause, and nothing in this price range does that I’m aware of.

Choosing sensors and switches that work with an independent third-party standard so they can be switched to a different home automation platform is a strategy a lot of people use.

As I mentioned above, I changed my own strategy in this regard back in 2015, and now assume that when I’m buying home automation, I’m buying technology services, not just hardware, and I budget so that I’m OK if any individual purchase only lasts me for three years. And it’s not necessarily because the company goes out of business: it may just be because there are new features available with new equipment that I really want. That approach worked very well for me, but different things work for different people.

p.s. because I rely on a screen reader, it’s very difficult for me to read the entirety of a really long conversation on a site like this. I can get the most recent posts, but ones that are buried in a reply to a reply earlier on are hard for me to find. So after the first 10 or 12 messages, I may not see a lot of the ones that come in later. If I missed anybody’s questions/comments directed specifically towards me, my apologies. It’s just my own limitations: I do better on a threaded site.

You’re absolutely right, there’s no guarantee, even with a large company that’s still around. I have a D-Link camera that no longer works, because D-Link decided to kill the servers. But at least they gave ample warning, with recommendations for replacement products. If you choose a platform with a single company making products for it, your risk is multiplied significantly. There are a lot of companies making products compatible with Alexa, Smart Things, etc., and they all have a stake in the platform. Nobody else had any skin in the Insteon game.

I’m considering ordering a Raspberry Pi 4 with power supply and case. I plan to run Home Assistant but I guess I need an Insteon plug in to communicate with my Hubs. I’m not a coder so I’m not exactly sure how to set this thing up but I am an EE so I should be able to figure it out. If anyone has step by step instructions on how to do this I would appreciate it. I do see some setup instructions at https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi so that might be good enough. Anyone know where to get an Insteon plug in for he Raspberry Pi?

I also recently bought an Aerotec Hub that can interface with SmartThings and Z-Wave devices. Should I dump my Insteon Hub and devices and just go with that?

If you’re going with the Pi4, the Pi should communicate with your hub via the LAN. I had a shotgun start with HA as well and it’s fairly intuitive learning curve that is aided by the online documentation and the forums.

If your Insteon hardware is still working, why not keep it going and replace as required when pieces fail.

Christopher – I thought rpi’s were hard to find these days. Did you find a place to get one? I am also a EE, but do mostly software dev now. I’m wondering if we should set up a bulletin board specifically for us Insteon orphans. I too am likely going to try the Home Assistant path because I want compat with HomeKit, but was about to prepare to set up a virtual machine (VM) on an older computer to try it before going with a Rpi. If you have such an older computer, or a secondary one, it’s likely easier and quicker to load VirtualBox from Oracle (free) and run the Home Assistant software in a VM. Then if that all works well, I would set up a dedicated Rpi.

A VMware virtual machine was my path forward with my HTPC that’s already on 24/7.

If you’re going with HA, the forum there is a good place to exchange ideas and find solutions: https://community.home-assistant.io/

I found a Raspberry Pi 4 on Amazon and it should show up this week. Not cheap, though. I have an old Windows 7 laptop but don’t really want to go the route of leaving it on forever.

Reddit already has a subforum for Insteon, that should be a good place for detailed discussion. Their general home automation subforum covers all brands and is a good place for questions as well. I’m sure there are also a number of active Facebook groups.

https://www.reddit.com/r/insteon/

So, when Insteon’s “lights” went out, my automatic scenes were still working as (mostly) expected. However, yesterday morning, none of the lights turned off at sunrise (I don’t actually use the “sunrise” option because it’s nearly an hour off here in the San Fran Bay Area.) Anyway, I found that… peculiar. Then when evening came around, none of the lights went “On.” So I went around the house and manually turned on the “Evening” scene lights to their approximate level. I did the same for the “Bedtime” scene. Unfortunately, all nighttime lights were still on this morning.

I don’t understand why this happened. My Hub is still on, albeit with a red indicator light. But, I expected these automatic scenes to continue working until I figure out which of these other (mentioned here in Stacey’s thread) platforms I want to switch to in keeping my Insteon devices.

Anyone else have this happen. The best I can tell from what I’ve seen here is most people still had some functionality going. My dimmer switches are all now demoted to “dumb” dimmer switches. I just don’t get this.

I have two Insteon hubs (in different states and condos) and one of them seemed to stop working but the other one is still going with two or three scenes. Problem is I can’t change the on/off times anymore so they are coming on much earlier than I need but they are LED lights so not that much power is wasted. I plan to migrate to something that can control the Insteon hub.

I had similar problems with another brand. It turns out that AWS was partly down again. It’s been very flaky lately (for several months0), which is disconcerting considering how much relies on it.

Posters at the Reddit subforum report that ISY is in talks with Insteon to see if they can at least get a license to manufacture PLMs, which might be doable even while the bankruptcy is going on, as a shortterm license with an early termination clause shouldn’t affect the value of the intellectual property and might actually increase it if it helped keep the Insteon customer base from losing as many people for now.

It’s a sliver of a niche market, but it would be something. So we’ll see.

https://www.reddit.com/r/insteon/

(For those unfamiliar with the PLM device, it is Insteon-specific and allows some other systems, in this case specifically ISY, to communicate with some Insteon devices and bring them onto that company’s platform. )

Thanks for this. However, while this news comes with a sliver of hope, if in fact Insteon is officially in bankruptcy, I doubt a judge would allow such a short-term deal that does not make any headway into the liquidation of the company’s assets. But boy, this *would* be fantastic if it happens.

I’ve been a homeseer user since 2002 and it definitely will work with Insteon, in fact more of my Insteon devices were. I trolled with homeseer than were directly.. homeseer has solid support community in its forums and through ticketing Homeseer can also be the “glue” that ties many of your home automation systems together, theres also a nice app you can design your own screens if web control or voice control isn’t your thing.

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