sorka

I got my replacement caps today from an ebay seller. Spent a few extra bucks for the curation of them rather than going straight to Digikey. Now I'm not so sure it was the right thing to day. Two of the caps have significantly bumped voltages which I thought was an issue for powerline signal reliability: C3 - 6.8 µF 250 v (replacement is 450 v).C11 - 100 µF 25 v (replacement is 50 v) Is this ok?

So it sounds like this is a "replace PLM" process rather than just a restore and would require placing all battery operated Insteon devices into programming mode to update the links since the board with the caps is also the board that has the Insteon address for the PLM?

Does anyone know if I can swap a board from my new 2.6 to my 2.5? Which board has the address of the PLM? The big one with the caps or the small one with the RJ45 jack? Hopefully the small one?

Ordered yesterday. Shipped today. Should be here by Tuesday.

Thanks. I ordered a new one. I also ordered multiple sets of caps for the 2.4-2.6 versions. I guess cap failure on their power supply redesign was a thing, just not a soon as the old design. I still have my previous failed PLM which appears to be a 2.4. The caps look to be through hole, so they should be pretty easy to replace. I won't even attempt surface mount.

I'd reply to one of the many existing threads about this but can't because they've all been archived...which is why there are so many threads. I believe 2.5 is the last version made by Smarthome before they went belly up. It's been since I got it but 3 times in 2 weeks tells me I'm in trouble. Has anyone had a 2.5 memory failure yet? Is there any point in rebuilding the power supply? I heard a rumor that new ones might be available again soon.

Did you actually read my post? Apparently whomever decided to nuke the other 7 leds didn't realize that the on/off switches can be be used as REMOTE dimmers.

Does the new on/off switchlinc work with the older switches? https://shop.insteon.com/products/on-off-switch The fact that this new one only has 2 leds for on/off worries me that it may not work correctly. All the old on/off switches still had the full led array for level since they can and are often used as remote dimmers for the switches actually carrying the loads.

Had a slight scare today. One of my older Insteon switchlincs stopped sending. It continued to receive just fine but none of the other linked switched would respond. I did a restore from the ISY console. No luck. Then it hit me that I actually hadn't power cycled it. I pulled the airgap for 10 seconds and then restored power. That fixed it. It got me thinking about what I would do if I needed replacements. I have a dozen or so spares of my various wall switches. I moved away from Insteon years ago for motion sensors and open-close sensors. The motion sensors were replaced with additional wired zones to my alarm system which integrates with the ISY through the DSC nodelink. i/o lincs were all replaced with other devices that integrate through various polyglot plugins. My next attempt was to start replacing Insteon switches that were not part of scenes and these replaced Insteon switches would be taken out of service and placed in reserve as backups. However, I always planned to keep the core lighting switch setup that has multiple linked switches in scenes intact. Nobody does scene lighting as well as Insteon even after all these years. It's a great standard that was backed by a lousy company with sometimes lousy implementations. However, my Insteon to z-wave replacement stopped fairly quickly as z-wave, among the 5 or so well reputed brands, tended to be buggy and unreliable even with repeaters. So all of my wall switches remain Insteon. I have spares enough to last a while. I have about 1 Insteon device a year actually fail and most of those were first-generation non-dual band devices. I've never had a dual-band switch fail. I had a bunch of PLMs that failed after a year or so due to the power supply capacitor issue but the last PLM with the final smart home fix has been good for years now and I have the failing PLMs in a box that I can do the power supply fix on if I need to. But it got me thinking what will happen to used Insteon prices? They're high now. Will homeowners hold onto their Insteon installations and pay more and more for an ever-decreasing supply? Or will more homeowners abandon Insteon altogether and look for widely supported and manufactured alternatives like z-wave? I'm sure z-wave will mature at some point in terms of at least having devices meet the specs but z-wave will never be as slick as Insteon because the standard, no matter how well-executed, can do what Insteon does. In the latter, whole home installations will come out and hit the secondary market. Both the former and latter will happen but the rate at which each does will either grow or shrink the supply.

Actually just one new issue also solved and it was the same night, not the "next" night. My thanks to @techman in this thread for solving the 1011 issue. The other one I solved myself. The Leviton plug I bought does not support reporting its status. I'm not willing to use the hail program work around. I have multiple additional brands coming in the next few days and will report in the other thread which ones do and don't report their status.

Given that this thread solved my issue in about an hour, I think it worked out for me just fine ?

Since this thread is now completely off topic, I've asked the mod to either retitle and move it or split it.

False. Had the the old thread been up still I simply would have ask "was this ever solved for anyone"? . If no answers, I would have started a new thread posted all the details as if it had never been asked. But that's NOT what would have happened. Every member in this forum who posted this issue has already had it solved and one of them would have replied.

You mean like what I did in the first post? How's that working out? Had they not been closed I wouldn't have done what you claimed closing the topics fixes.

This is an awful practice. It eliminates context and previous lessons learned. It also keeps those who have awareness of the issues being informed when something new related to it is posted since they are not following the new threads already. I totally agree that closing out threads that get off track is an occasional ok practice when it doesn't lock out awareness of valuable trouble shooting. By closing these threads, folks who've had their problem solved can't post in the existing threads so it looks like the problem was never solved...as in this case. I did post links to the previous threads, but I was already so irritated by them being closed and preventing awareness of this issue already being solved, that it basically turned into a rant from me. Also, I didn't upgrade to a weird version. I updated to the version every said I should 3 years ago and haven't gotten a prompt in the UI since to upgrade that version to something newer. Prior to 5.0.14, I'd occasionally get prompted to update the firmware which I would do. Did upgrading to 5.0.14 eliminate that because I was on some funky version?