Insteon Life Support Via Home Assistant

As explained in my post yesterday, it looks like Insteon was unceremoniously switched off on April 14th and users are scrambling to keep their smart home alive until they can find a replacement.  Many r/Insteon users have turned to Home Assistant to keep Insteon running on life support.

If you’re not familiar with Home Assistant, check out my series documenting my journey from setup to configuration to see if its for you.  If you are familiar with Home Assistant, it should be no surprise to you that Insteon devices can still work, kind of, if you have the Insteon integration configured.  There are some serious limitations, though.  First, if you use a voice assistant to control your Insteon devices, you’ll have to fork over some cash to Home Assistant to use their cloud service.  It’s $6.50/month or $65/year so it may be more than you’re willing to shell out to continue using your mostly dead devices.  Next, you can only control devices you already have set up.  The Home Assistant Insteon integration doesn’t have the ability to discover new devices (EDIT: You can discover new devices with this method), which you’re unlikely to be doing anyway, or rediscover devices that may lose their connection.  Last, you’re not going to be able to use your existing schedules or scenes or anything like that.  If they’ve stopped working, they’re gone and you’ll have to attempt to rebuild them in HA.

Since I’m down to only three Insteon dimmer switches and two leak sensors, this hasn’t been a huge hit, but one of those switches is my main kitchen lights so it’s been an annoyance.  Once I resolved an issue with my Insteon hub having changed its IP address causing HA to lose connection (Pro Tip: It’s always a good idea to assign static IP addresses for your hubs in your router’s DHCP settings), I was able to control my lights again.  Since one of the switches controls my pool light, and it’s not pool season in New York, I’ve already replaced it with an old WeMo switch I had laying around.  For the other two switches in the house, I built automations for HA to turn them on at sunset and off at 11 PM.

The leak detectors were a bit of a challenge because I needed to configure them to send push notifications to my phone, something I’ve never done before.  Thankfully HA makes this pretty easy as long as you have the HA app installed on your phone and it’s been discovered by HA.  I was able to create a new automation via dropdowns, telling HA to send a push notification to my phone if the sensor detected a leak.  I had to create two separate automations so that I could send two separate messages, one for my basement and one for my attic, but if you’re really good at building HA automations I’m sure you could consolidate this into one for less overhead.

Compared to some of the horror stories I’ve read the last few days, I got off easy.  If you’re heavy into Insteon, using HA will keep you going for a little while, but you’re going to start missing features soon enough.  It would be a long shot at this point, but I’m still holding out hope that Insteon turns their servers back on.  Until then, Home Assistant or the other similar free products may be your only hope to bridge the gap until you can switch products.