Insteon Hub - The Achilles Heel of Insteon

Insteon Hub

A couple of weeks before Christmas, my Insteon hub died.  There were no pyrotechnics or alarms and to the disappointment of the TV generation, nothing exploded and no people were thrown across the room.  What did happen is that I tried to turn on some lights with my Amazon Echo and it told me that it couldn't connect to the Insteon hub.  That's weird - so I took a look at it.

The Insteon hub is a plain, white, square device with a single light on the front that is green when all is well and red when there's a problem (usually a network issue).  I looked at the hub and the light was off.  That's new.  I unplugged it and plugged it back in.  Nothing.  I hit the reset button (which I had never before used).  Nothing.  It was dead as a doornail.

This was quite a surprise.  My hub had served me well for over two years.  Even worse, the two year warranty had expired a couple of months before.  Bother!

However, all was not lost.  All of my Insteon switches still worked.  All of my scenes (like the ones to control the buttons on my 8 button keypad) still worked.  What was broken?  My Amazon Echo integration and my timed scenes.  That was my big ouch because I had just set up scenes to turn on my Christmas lights (indoor and outdoor) at sunset and turn the off at 10pm.  Well, no more automated Christmas lights.  That was lousy timing!

Of course I want my Christmas lights on their timer again so I immediately started researching what I needed to do.  What I found was that the Insteon devices and scenes are more or less hard coded to the hub.  This means that I can't transfer my setup to a new hub, I have to start over.  I've got about 12 Insteon devices and probably that many scenes set up.  Not cool!

The forums where I found this information suggested that I reach out to Insteon support to see if they could help.  It sounded like a good idea so I fired off an email.  A couple days later Insteon responded that they were sorry my hub died and would send me a new one after I supply my receipt and a picture of it.  I thought it was out of warranty but if I can get a free replacement - great!

A little while later I got confirmation that they were sending it and a couple days after Christmas, I received it.  Kudos to Insteon support!  However, up to this point my questions on how to transfer my account to the new hub had been ignored and the official Insteon documentation for installing a new hub instruct you to delete all of your devices and scenes from your old hub, delete your account, and recreate everything on the new hub.  Not only did I not want to go through the pain of doing that, I couldn't because my old hub was dead and so I couldn't log into it to drop scenes and delete devices.  So I reached out to support again.

This is where it got kind of weird.  I asked if I really had to delete everything and how to do it if my old hub was dead.  They responded with a "please confirm that you want to remove all your devices and delete your account" email with a listing of all my devices and their IDs (which allows me to re-set them up without having to manually pair each device).  Actually, I wanted to know if that was my only option.  That question was completely ignored.  Not happy but tired enough of the half answers, etc. that I just said yes and the next day they confirmed that my old account was deleted.

So now I'm ready to set up my new hub.  I created a new account and, since I already had the IDs for my devices, I was able to set them up quickly and then recreate my scenes.  By quickly, I mean a couple of hours of documenting what I already had and about an hour of recreating everything.

Success!  Everything works again!  Now here's my issue:  Do I want to purchase more items from Insteon which will make this process even worse the next time my hub dies?  The short answer is no - what's the point in having a cloud service if the service is unrecoverable if your hub dies.  The longer answer is - if not, what do I replace it with?

Is there a system out that that works just as well but doesn't have this issue?  Echo Plus?  Smarthings?  Wink?  Will they have the instant response time of the Insteon?  Will they be around for the long haul (remember Revolv - it's gone now).  That's the conundrum: Is the solution more worse than the problem?  I'm crossing my fingers that I'll have a couple of years to figure it out before my hub dies again.