Insteon

When I started my personal home automation setup in 2012 I started my lighting journey with Insteon. They were the best consumer friendly smart switch back then. Lutron was too expensive and z-wave wasn’t there yet. One of the big selling points for me is the instant p2p communication. I can have a door open/close sensor or a motion sensor directly control light switches. It is so fast that if you didn’t know, you would think the lights in the room behind the door sensor were always on.

My recommendation about using Insteon today is at the bottom.

Insteon features

These are just some of the awesome features that the Insteon protocol has

• real instant device status reporting (see footnote below)
• It broadcasts over rf and powerline to reduce interference issues and be able to communicate further. (patented, which is why no one else does it)
• syn/ack capabilities
• Retry capabilities
• Error detection and correction
• Keeps track of how many times the message has been broadcasted to keep from causing an infinite broadcast storm
• Is p2p so a hub controller isn’t required for devices to work together or for communications to go through. One example of this is linking two switches for a 3 way switch. You don’t need a controller to do it
• Is a mesh setup, so one node going down doesn’t break a link to half of your devices (a slight dig at zwave).
• The PLM control module has a link records limit of 992, so you’re very unlikely to hit the device limit
• Higher data rate and lower latency

Dimmer and switch revision numbers

There have been many revisions of the 2477D dimmer, and 2477S switch, over time. They are up into the 8.x territory. I have yet to find a public revision list, but one thing I do know is that the 7.x set of revisions have a slightly off-white paddle that doesn’t match the other Insteon revisions or any other switch out there.

(Insteon picture here)

Some other changes between revisions have been related to the size of the status LEDs, the internal capacitors, and at one point they switched the 2477S from using the exact some body and LED system as the 2477D to only having on/off LEDs.

Drawbacks

Although I love Insteon, I do have to point out their drawbacks.

• If you want a uniform system throughout your house, their device range is limited.
• If you have switches linked for direct control of each other (virtual 3-way sort of setup), the receiver device won’t broadcast its change and Home Assistant and probably other controllers don’t poll devices for status updates.
• The 7.x revision switches and dimmers aren’t a standard shade of white
• They’re too expensive buying new these days. You can even get good quality new z-wave switches for less than used insteon switches
• Their older USB PLMs have a known capacitor issue. I don’t know if the newer ones still have that.
• Who knows what will happen with the company now that it is customer owned after the bankruptcy.

My Insteon recommendation

Sadly, at this point I don’t think I can recommend Insteon to beginners to home automation anymore. I’m still pretty much all in with them for some of the reasons mentioned above, but with the prices, state of the company and the state of z-wave, I can’t recommend Insteon for people just diving in to home automation today. I’m currently considering pulling them out of places where I’m not directly using them in virtual 3-ways or with p2p sensor communication.

footnote: “real” instant status reports

When a switch paddle is pressed, Insteon will immediately report the status change to the controller. This sounds like an obvious thing to do, but that functionality is patented, I believe by SmartLabs, Inc, and many z-wave switches don’t do it. Some z-wave switches have licensed it, I think some have ignored the patent, and others do a pseudo instant report. They do this by sending a networking frame saying “hey controller, I have changed, please ask me for a status update” The controller will then reach out for the status, and then the switch will tell it that it has been turned on. Switches that don’t do instant status updates have a noticeably longer delay in reaction time to support that back and forth communnication. For most, this won’t be an issue. For me, I notice this during some automation.