Lights out at Insteon

In April 2022, Insteon suddenly, without warning, shut down their servers, sent their employees home, and turned off the lights for the last time.

All over the world, Insteon users like me began to notice something was wrong.

The first thing I noticed was Alexa wouldn't turn on my kitchen lights. She responded with a “Hmmm, something went wrong”. Not an unusual occurrence these days. Alexa often has difficulties with certain skills like Pandora, but Insteon was wonderful and worked 100% of the time.

I actually had to get up out of my easy chair and manually push the button on my kitchen keypad dimmer! (First world probs, I know.)

Then I temporarily unplugged my Echo show and tried the Insteon app on my iPhone while Alexa was restarting.

The app gave me a “something went wrong” error as well.

I went into my office to find the indicator light on the hub was red. No worries. That means it lost its Internet connection. So I temporarily unplugged the Insteon hub, my router and cable modem. Again, not an uncommon occurrence, so I still wasn't concerned.

Then I waited. And waited. Staring at the red indicator light. Waiting for it to turn green like it always did.

But that day was different. The light stayed red.

I had a contact at Insteon and he sent me several products to use in videos back in 2016. We'd been in touch recently because he was very excited for a Nokia deal and he wanted my help to make videos when the products launched.

Then, out of the blue, in late March, I got this mysterious email from him.

Hi Chris,

I wanted to reach out and inform you that I am no longer with Smartlabs. Unfortunately at this time I don’t have visibility into what’s next for them and therefore no personal contact there for you. If that changes, I will let you know.

Keep making great videos.

I didn't think anything of it; I thought he left on his own. Looking back in hindsight, it's clear that he was probably laid off like everyone else. And he probably got a little severance in exchange for signing a non-disclosure agreement so he'd keep silent.

Several days after the shutdown, the Insteon website was finally updated with a notice acknowledging that Insteon, Smarthome, and their parent company, Smartlabs, went out of business.

What am I going to do?

First, I'll keep exercising my fingers by manually pushing buttons. All my devices still work.

The beauty of Insteon is that the devices are all linked to one another and they really don't need a hub. I was using Insteon before the hub was invented. Back then, you needed to manually link your devices with the SET buttons. It was like the Dark Ages. The hub triggered the Renaissance.

The Insteon hub, with connectivity to Insteon's servers, had a few main benefits:

• It was required to use the Insteon app, which made it much easier to setup devices and scenes, as well as control devices from your phone.
• It was the gateway for external services, like Google Home and Amazon Alexa, to control your devices.
• It also enabled schedule automations, such as turning on your lights at dusk and off at midnight. Funny thing is, these automations were stored in the hub so they kept working even without the servers. But you can't edit them without the app.

The good news is, you can restore your Insteon smart home back to its former glory! You just need something to replace Insteon's servers as your bridge to the outside world.

I highly recommend HomeSeer for that purpose. Check out this video to see why.