Insteon Secondary Market Future

[sorka]

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.

Edited May 19, 2022 by sorka

[jec6613]

41 minutes ago, sorka said:

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.

Over the next months, many of the smaller Insteon installs that relied on hubs will come on the secondary market.  Dozens of devices in some cases - I plan on grabbing a bunch out of my mother's home when she gets rid of them.

As for alternatives for lighting: Lutron, and that's kind of it.  Z-Wave will get better, but for lighting it's still at least a decade away, while RadioRA2/RadioRA3 and their derivatives like Caseta are in my experience an even better solution than Insteon for pure lighting.  Coupled with a Caseta Node server and some Z-Wave, and you have quite the wining system on your hands.

[lilyoyo1]

6 hours ago, sorka said:

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.

From the way it sounds, i wouldn't worry about insteon. You have so many devices (and access to more) by the time lack of devices becomes an issue, the market will probably be different with to warrant taking another path at that time. 

In the meantime, ebay has become a dumping ground. There are so many devices on there, now is the time to buy since supply and demand has prices very low. I suspect it'll be this way for some time.

Lutron is a great system but until Ra3 is supported it's a no go on here. For now, caseta and ra2 works. However, 5 years from now, that remains to be seen as lutron makes changes. That leads into my next thing. Worrying about tomorrow isn't worth it. There are changes coming to the market so things could be clearer/better by then. 

 

Edited May 19, 2022 by lilyoyo1