On the evening of April 14th, 2022 I was headed to my kitchen to cook and asked Alexa to turn on the kitchen lights. After a brief pause she reported “Kitchen lights isn’t responding.” I’m no stranger to device outages, they annoyingly happen all the time when you have so many connected devices in your house. But it’s rare when the device that isn’t responding is a hard wired switch that uses both radio frequency and powerline to communicate back to its hub. Was my Insteon hub fried again?
I checked my hub and sure enough there was a red light in place of the normal, happy green. I then checked the app and it wouldn’t connect. That was strange. A fried hub wouldn’t cause an app outage. So I took to Reddit to see if there was anything going on, and boy was there. It turns out that right around the same time users from all over the country were reporting their Insteon hubs had stopped working. What’s more, the Insteon support site is down and their phone number just returns a busy signal. Has Insteon finally died?
Insteon was a stalwart of the bygone era when smart homes were the things of millionaires and computer nerds. Aside from moving from X10 to Insteon, there hasn’t been much advancement for them in a very long time. A few years back we saw their first new product in ages, the Hub 2. It cost at least twice the price of the original Hub and introduced compatibility with Apple HomeKit. That was basically the entire list of features you added by paying significantly more. Insteon products also remained at the high end of the price scale in comparison to newer entrants as home automation exploded over the past ten years. Despite fierce competition, their prices and offerings didn’t budge.
Insteon finally upgraded their app after years of user complaints. This was accompanied by a letter from the CEO about how the company was making huge strides to change. They also claim to have addressed user complaints about faulty products that had plagued the lineup for years. This was the last we heard from Insteon. Their Twitter account went dark last June. Their blog has been silent since early 2020. They stopped interacting in the Reddit forum around the same time.
Various Insteon products, including their popular starter kits, slowly disappeared from major retailers like Costco and Amazon where they used to be widely available. On their own product site, (the coveted url) smarthome.com, inventory has slowly been trickling away and today most products are sold out. Frustratingly, they’ve had a 50% off sale going for quite some time. This is a really shitty way to do your customers wrong if you’re selling them products that require your servers to be running and you know you plan to shut down your servers.
At the time of this post, roughly 16 hours since Insteon hubs everywhere stopped working, I have not heard back from support. The Insteon reddit is filling up with “rest in peace” posts and suggested workarounds to keep the products working without being able to connect to the Insteon servers*. The Insteon app now loads but is unable to authenticate my account.
It’s been a while since I stopped recommending Insteon products. Funny enough, in my last post about Insteon. I mentioned that each of my hubs had only lasted two years, so we’d check back in 2022 to see if my hub was still functional. Little did I know it wouldn’t be the hub but the whole damn company that fizzled out.
*The leading suggestion is to operate your devices via Home Assistant. I have not tried this yet and will create a post about how to do it if I can get it to work. Be aware if you plan to do this and use a voice assistant, even HA requires you to pay for their cloud service.
I look forward to your post about integrating Insteon devices with Home Assistant. I would really hate to replace the devices.
Check back tomorrow, I have a quick update about what I’m putting in place.
Just went through everything you mentioned above! Thought this would happen as I noticed it getting harder to get new switches. I would love to hear how we can still use existing switches or which product to move too. But that’s a huge job.
After trying to reset and re-establish my hub and pulling my hair out, I had the sense to check the internet for the truth, as ugly as it is. I put a lot of money and effort into my home network with switches and the hub. I figured this day would come sometime as you stopped seeing distributors like Menards stop carrying the product. Maybe they could have survived had they charged for the network, which at this point I would have paid, but it probably would have just delayed the inevitable. Any idea what to do with the switches? Not sure other than just dumb dimmers at this point as I doubt anyone will make a play for Insteon.
It’s referenced a few times in the latest r/Insteon posts like this one that Nokia was interested in buying them but backed off. Apparently their parent company is owned by an investment firm and most people think they’ll just liquidate the company and move on. I’ve been able to get partial functionality from my switches with Home Assistant and have a short update about it coming out tomorrow. Hopefully it helps some people.
I operate wall switches and thermostats in two houses through Alexa commands using Insteon. I am resigned to replace my entire system. What system would you recommend?
Since I started this site I’ve always been a proponent of using multiple systems for reasons like this. I’ve been transitioning to TP-Link wifi switches for a while now. I just ordered Wyze moisture sensors to replace my Insteon ones. I use Bond for all of my RF fans, Amazon, TP-Link and Govee for my plugs (whatever is on sale at the time), my motion sensors are a mix of Wyze and Ring, lights are Hue/Hue compatible and Govee, and then several other vendors for other solutions. Most of it is documented here. Behind the scenes it’s a bit of a pain to get set up, but for everyone else it’s all either automated or voice commands. If you have specific areas to address I’m happy to make suggestions.
Before reading your post, earlier today I was near Insteon’s headquarters in Irvine where they have a customer facing storefront (where I bought most of my equipment). Upon opening their door, which oddly had the signage removed, I was surprised to see the entire place gutted! It was a ghost town. I walked through all the hallways and every room was stripped to the walls — no people, no desks, no equipment, nothing.
I found a fellow tenant in the building who told me they shut down and cleared out everything last Friday (April 8).
RIP Insteon.
I had thought that Nokia had a piece of Insteon and was going to move forward. Ref: https://nokia.smartlabsinc.com/ I hope there is some trust to this and Smart Labs will support legacy products
Apparently that deal fell through a couple of years ago. This was also about Nokia licensing Insteons IP and not about merging as I understand it.
When will someone buy the severs and charge a monthly $5.00 like other clouds?
I never saw this coming. I’ve been happy with my Insteon setup and haven’t needed to purchase anything for a couple of years. It all just worked. It all still works – the only thing I’ve lost is Alexa support. I do miss that but it’s not the end of the world. What I’m worried about is that I have an 8 button keypad that’s controlling, in part, 2 ceiling fans in my living room. The 2 fans are both hooked to 1 switch (yes – poor design) so I put a fanlinc in each and hardwired the switch to be always on. Now I just control them from the keypad. It’s really great. However, now I won’t be able to get a replacement if it goes out. I’ve looked around a little but the equivalent of the Insteon fanlinc doesn’t see to be out there. Neither does the 8 button keypad. Now what do I do?
My ISY994i is still working fine with my Insteon devices – after a bit of trouble a few months ago with the Alexa voice interface (it seemed to occur when the ISY had to change servers – it looked like it was having trouble with the failover and would give me the “X is not responding” message). The ISY994i web interface has not had any problems staying in communication with Insteon devices directly via my house network. The voice commands stabilized a couple of months ago and have been working reliably since. (Just did a test a few minutes ago.)
Insteon, on the other hand, has an article on their travails at https://www.insteon.com/news2022. Bottom line, they got in some trouble in 2017 but got additional money to keep going – then COVID hit and the disruptions to their supply chain hurt them badly and an attempt to find a parent company fell through last month. They are now “assigned to a financial services firm in March to optimize the assets of the company”. Doesn’t sound promising…