Preparing to divest Insteon devices

[mikef137]

We have a moderate-sized Insteon installation, approximately 80-100 devices. We worked through issues with the uncommanded "all-on" events a few years back and have been trouble-free for several years. Well, once again, the dreaded "all-on" events have reappeared. We have attempted several remedies, such as removing all battery Insteon devices, modifying programming to not send commands to initiating devices and inserting ridiculous delays between every program action. However, we still cannot shake the occasional "all-on" event.

I am done screwing with Insteon. It is too bad because when it works, it is great. But I can no longer tolerate these all-on events.

I will be swapping out all Insteon for zwave or Lutron ra2/3 components. Is there a market for used Insteon devices? We have dimmers, keypads, keypad dimmers, motion sensors, door/window sensors, hidden door sensors, outletlincs, lamp modules, appliance modules, some new i3 stuff, etc.

If there is interest, I will make a list of devices and qtys available.

Has anyone else moved from Insteon? If so, to what?

Thanks

 

[vbPhil]

35 minutes ago, mikef137 said:

Well, once again, the dreaded "all-on" events have reappeared.

Please explain what you mean by this. I don't believe I've ever encountered it before.

[mikef137]

 

 

 

Here are a couple of the threads discussing the All-On events.  I am sure there are more within the forum as well, but these will give you an idea of he issue.

[TSinclair]

I went through this a couple years ago when my PLM died, my attempted repair didn't work,  and replacements at the time were going for $1000+.

I chose Z-wave, and more recently have added some Zigbee devices.  Although I would not go back to Insteon, Z-wave has it's own issues, and is not as reliable as Insteon.  At least in my ~80 device install, I'd put Z-wave (mostly Zooz devices) at 95% reliable.  I never experienced the "all on" events with insteon, but I can tell you, especially having to listen to the wife, the Z-wave devices not firing when they are supposed to is also VERY aggravating.

I sold my 80+ insteon devices in a few "lots" on ebay.  I did pretty well; I'd say at the time I got about 50 cents on the dollar.  I thought that was pretty good given most of the devices were 7 or 8 years old.  No doubt I would have done better had I listed devices individually, but I did not have the time or patience for that.

Good luck to you, but I'm not sure the ideal solution exists.

[JTsao]

I had all on events occurring maybe 2+ years ago with a similar number of Insteon switches in my house and eventually got it fixed - It was really annoying when all of the lights came on at 3AM - I tried to search my postings to recall how I fixed it but couldn't find them, but I believe that I cleaned up/pruned all of the links in the devices and the PLM and deleted unnecessary scenes and performed some scene cleanup

A year ago, I did a fairly extensive remodel of our kitchen and built out a new laundry room into our garage and I used several Zooz Z-Wave 700 Zen switches in this area as a test - I have since pulled some of the Zooz switches out and put Insteon switches in their place - IMHO, Insteon switches are still simply the best product out there...

[elvisimprsntr]

I must be in the minority, because I have never (knock on wood) encountered a random all on event, and I have been using Insteon since ~2007

[Andy P]

I tried twice seriously to move away from Insteon. My old house had a similar number of devices that you mentioned. I never experience the all on event you mention, though, in over 10 years there.

When building a new house, I figured, ok, what is the best thing out there. I got a bunch of zwave equipment and a hubitat hub. Also, got some Lutron stuff with the pro hub. I also got a Smartthings hub and installed a bunch of Samsung sensors.

Long story short, the zwave stuff gave you a ton of options, but every device seemed to have a different way to pair, the scene support fell way short of insteon, and the Hubitat hub was simple to use, had a lot of plugins, was being actively developed. I probably could have made that hub work, but I had a lot more problems with zwave than insteon so I scrapped that. I also started down the path of putting in HomeAssistant, but after doing a little bit of programming on it, abandoned that route.

I still have the Smartthings hub at one property where all I wanted was door and motion sensing. It works fine for that, but I would not scale it up to 100 devices.

The Lutron stuff was dead solid. I have family members who have whole houses full of it and they love it. I did not like the Lutron dimmer with the on/off/up/down config - but they now have a new simpler paddle dimmer. I was able to integrate the Lutron stuff into other hubs and voice assistants. If you go Lutron, you will probably want another hub to go with it for notifications and other automations.

In the end, I went back to Insteon, first with the ISY, then the EISY. Now I am removing my Lutron stuff and putting in I3 devices where they were. I have 80+ devices in the new house and it works great. I pulled most of the zwave and hubitat stuff out of the barn and got a second EISY for there and put in Insteon.

I really did set out to replace Insteon, but in the end, the programming capability, the extendibility with Polyglot, the 6 and 8 button keypads, scene programming, etc brought me back. I might have felt differently if I had experienced the problem you are having.

Andy

[lilyoyo1]

There is no replacement for insteon. No matter how much they add to zwave it still falls short when it comes to performance and flexibility. 

Ra3 (lutron in general) greatly exceeds Insteon in performance but is not as flexible. Not even close. If eisy was able to support ra3, lutron would be better but since it doesn't it's a moot point.

[vbPhil]

2 hours ago, Andy P said:

I also started down the path of putting in HomeAssistant, but after doing a little bit of programming on it, abandoned that route.

I switched over to Home Assistant and only use Polisy for the Insteon hub. No ISY programs or Polyglot, doing it all from HA and lovin' it. Just started using ESPHome with HA and it's amazing, built 2 ESP32 WiFi remote devices so far. Z-wave is awful compared to Insteon although there's more variety especially if you need power monitoring. I'm in a 4500 sqft home with just around 50 Insteon devices. Sometimes you must resist the temptation to automate something even though you can, keep life simple.

[xlurkr]

My story is similar to Andy's.  I'm living in a temporary "work away from home" apartment, so I'm limited in what i can do with the wiring.  But since I was starting from scratch, and I'd heard such great things about Lutron, I thought I'd give it a try.  It is indeed rock solid, and their support for LED bulb dimming even in their older dimmers is outstanding.  Like Insteon, you need a logic engine to do anything sophisticated with it.  I'd recommend the Hubitat if you want an ISY-like experience, or HA (which I'm just now starting to play around with) if you're a tinkerer.  Or I suppose the Lutron NS on ISY, as long as you stick to Caseta.  I have Caseta, and RA2, and QS standalone, and only Hubitat handles all these well, AFAIK.  For anyone starting out and wanting to buy new and have the longest support life, you'll be choosing RA3, and unfortunately I think it's still true that there isn't any good DIY platform that has licensed access to their security, as opposed to a reverse engineered solution that could break in the future.  But I admit I'm not up on the latest news.

Holwever, the Lutron world doesn't have anything as cheap yet as versatile as the KPL.  And it's really set up to do everything via scenes, and for buttons and motions to always invoke a scene that has actual physical lights in it, and the product lines lack many of the kinds of sensors that we've gotten used to in the Insteon and Z-Wave ecosystems.  But for just responding to commands and controlling the power to the lights, it can't be beat.  When I get back to my permanent home, I'm going to replace some of my Insteon with Lutron - probably just in the rooms most often occupied where I never want to have to repeat a command and the dimming performance is crucial.

-Tom

[brians]

13 hours ago, vbPhil said:

I switched over to Home Assistant and only use Polisy for the Insteon hub. No ISY programs or Polyglot, doing it all from HA and lovin' it. Just started using ESPHome with HA and it's amazing, built 2 ESP32 WiFi remote devices so far. Z-wave is awful compared to Insteon although there's more variety especially if you need power monitoring. I'm in a 4500 sqft home with just around 50 Insteon devices. Sometimes you must resist the temptation to automate something even though you can, keep life simple.

Same setup as you, my Polisy is just an Insteon hub now and think I am down to around 35 Insteon devices.

I have been using the Sonoff NSPanels (ESP32 based) with blueprint firmware to replace Insteon Keypadlincs...  Lights that I had with Insteon dimmer controls (NSPanel is relay only, no dimmer)I changed out to use Philips Hue Zigbee lights and control with NSPanel with light group. Performance controlling lights/entities seems instant, no delay - experience is as fast as Keypadlinc and its not just my bad memory and bias, because I still have a couple of keypadlinc in use and am able do comparisons - NSPanel is far better experience... RGB/Light temperature controls, Fan control for speed, Cover control, Climate Thermostat control, Alarm Panel Control, Media Player, Weather forecast, notifications on screen etc. Control up to 32 entities via buttons pages. Power monitoring page is being worked on (NSPanel Lovelace UI has that already, but the panel performs more slow/sluggish when I tested and I prefer blueprint version).

This is all great, but  if HA goes down, I lose control of all this!

Since I am more reliant on a central controller now, have to make sure it is rock solid. Although no issues so far, some of the updates for HA are very significant and a bit scary, but I have not been hit by any breaking changes yet. Recently I have moved my HA to Proxmox on an Intel NUC and can restore easily from backup onto a new system in minutes if required. I can also take snapshots before major updates and roll back very fast if I experience significant breaking changes.

 

 

[peterathans]

 

On 9/29/2023 at 6:22 PM, JTsao said:

I had all on events occurring maybe 2+ years ago with a similar number of Insteon switches in my house and eventually got it fixed - It was really annoying when all of the lights came on at 3AM - I tried to search my postings to recall how I fixed it but couldn't find them, but I believe that I cleaned up/pruned all of the links in the devices and the PLM and deleted unnecessary scenes and performed some scene cleanup

A year ago, I did a fairly extensive remodel of our kitchen and built out a new laundry room into our garage and I used several Zooz Z-Wave 700 Zen switches in this area as a test - I have since pulled some of the Zooz switches out and put Insteon switches in their place - IMHO, Insteon switches are still simply the best product out there...

Hey @JTsao I'm curious, what prompted you to pull the Zooz switches and put Insteon back in?  Also, why did you replace "some of the switches" instead of all?

I'm in a similar situation as others here, I started with Insteon years ago (but only have a 15 or so devices), but lately had a bunch of cases where the switches won't respond for a while (noise-related I assume, but don't have the time or energy to go through the house and figure out what's causing the issue).  For a product that touts dual-band redundancy, there surprisingly flaky sometimes.

I've got a few Zooz devices (two Zen71, a Zen04, and a Zen17) and have had zero issues with them over the past year.  Really considering replacing all my other devices and going completely Zwave.

[JTsao]

1 hour ago, peterathans said:

Hey @JTsao I'm curious, what prompted you to pull the Zooz switches and put Insteon back in?  Also, why did you replace "some of the switches" instead of all?

I'm trying to recall everything but this is what I remember:

1-The dimmable switches did not have a "switched ON" condition for use in programming (status only; the On/Off switches do have a switched ON/OFF)

2-not easy to program Zooz switches for group/scene operation in a 3-way switch vs Insteon

3-slower to respond to commands from the controller vs. Insteon in the location being discussed (for some reason)

4-when I moved to ZMatter after using the Zooz USB stick, something stopped working related to scenes / 3-way switch (I am trying to remember exact details) - I have a weird setup where two small rooms, next to each other have their own light switches, but a switch on a common wall will turn everything in both rooms on and off - this got broken after doing the Polisy to eISY and Zooz to Zmatter migration - It was faster to physically replace the switches vs. figure out how to re-link the z-wave ones for scene operation

I only replaced some of the switches because of being lazy and I only fixed the ones in boxes related to the above circuit.  I have enough additional switches to replace all of them when I have the time.

So for switches, I prefer Insteon - however, I have removed all Insteon motion sensors and am using Zooz motion sensors exclusively now, also I use only Z-wave on/off plug in modules (Minston and Zooz) and have stopped using all Insteon there

[Michel Kohanim]

@JTsao,

While deciding, I am sure this is going to help with your all on issue:

https://wiki.universal-devices.com/index.php?title=INSTEON_Random_All_On_Events

With kind regards,
Michel

[bpwwer]

On 9/30/2023 at 5:07 AM, lilyoyo1 said:

Ra3 (lutron in general) greatly exceeds Insteon in performance but is not as flexible. Not even close. If eisy was able to support ra3, lutron would be better but since it doesn't it's a moot point.

The library that the Caseta node server uses does have support for RA3 but since I don't have any RA3 devices, I don't have any way to verify what works and what doesn't.  I suspect that any RA3 devices that match the Caseta device classes will work with the generic device type support in the node server.

For something like a dimmer, the only difference between the generic support and specific Caseta dimmer support is that it displays the Caseta model numbers instead of the word "generic".

The node server will also report info about any devices it doesn't recognize and by sending me that info, I can usually add support for that device into the node server.  So anyone with RA3 devices that wants to test that, just get a trial license for the node server and let me know what it does.

[mikef137]

On 10/5/2023 at 10:29 AM, Michel Kohanim said:

@JTsao,

While deciding, I am sure this is going to help with your all on issue:

https://wiki.universal-devices.com/index.php?title=INSTEON_Random_All_On_Events

With kind regards,
Michel

Thank you Michael, I appreciate your support.  I have seen this wiki before but will give it one last shot.  I have been an Insteon user from very near the beginning as well as a 99, 994, and eisy customer.  Love the UD products, and love Insteon, when it works.

[jkosharek]

I have tried to get away from Insteon on a few homes but always come back. Between the keypads and virtual 3/4 way switch/dimmer functions I haven't found something 'better'.