There exists one very BIG problem which resides inside the home automation lighting control INSTEON anywhere remote control dimmer design from concept through implementation and it is this:

Most early INSTEON devices are designed to communicate via power line command streams (PLC) and NOT via rf based command streams. This includes most lighting switches which represent, by far, the largest inventory for most households. INSTEON likes to refer to their system as being “dual band” because they also supply devices which plug into the power lines and sample the power line command traffic, repeating that traffic onto an rf link where it can be detected by other, similar, devices which then repeat the same traffic back into the power lines. The important point in all of this is that none of the older lighting switches (and other older devices) communicate via rf links. They only communicate via power line based command streams. Forgive me if I’ve succeeded in beating the point to death but it is important, and here’s why:
Unless you live in an area of the country where your home’s electrical system never experiences electrical surges you will, sooner or later, experience failures amongst your older INSTEON devices due to surge damaged internal components. The obvious way to protect those components from surge damage is to incorporate some level of surge protection into the overall design. This could be done if the older Insteon design concept did not rely upon power line communication only. Since surge protectors operate by attempting to ‘smooth out’ any unusual activity in the power line traffic they often interfere with Insteon’s power line command strings (if you have used surge protectors nearby INSTEON devices you may have noticed problems) and so older Insteon devices are constrained from including effective surge protection.
We have a very large home which is ‘loaded’ with Insteon hardware to the extent that — one might say — we are fully commited (or ought to be) to this system design. What bothers us most of all is the fact that INSTEON INC. and its distributors have adopted an attitude which ignores their own responsibility towards the end users of this flawed design, and simply refuse to replace damaged components.
I wish you all good luck with these problems.

This isn’t a good product. It died shortly after the 2-year warranty ended (and insteon won’t replace it)

Over 20% of my insteon products haven’t lasted 2 years now.

These products should last 8-10 years. Especially for the thousands of dollars invested in the system.

I’ve just ripped out the insteon/smarthome system and sold all the parts. It’s not worth the investment to use insteon/smarthome.

Try X11 instead. My friend has had them installed for many years, and not one problem.

I installed three of these in my house in 2010, and they all failed, at different times, in different ways. I replaced one (under warranty), and the replacement failed too. They will not refund my money — just issue me replacements, but what kind of idiot would keep putting them back in when they all fail. And the company was very rude when I asked for a refund. I will never buy another product from them. Huge waste of time and money and very frustrating to spend that kind of money on a product that (for me) has a 100% failure rate.

Smarthome is an outfit that should be avoided like the plague. Their customer service is unprofessional, their policies are anti-customer and they think nothing of wasting your time, energy and money. The are NOT the only company that sells Insteon devices, and you can forget getting any support from them, so do yourself a favor and go elsewhere!

These switchlinc switches started failing, beginning with the most used ones, after two years. By 4 years, so many had failed, I ended up tearing them out and replacing them with conventional 3-way and 4-way switches. You had to wiggle the paddle to get them to operate, finally that would not even work and we were switching the lights off from the breaker box. Never worked reliably with X-10 signals. Every once in a while X-10 would work, mostly not. I have surge supressors in the house, and apparently X-10 is incompatible with surge supressors. Sorry, I’ll keep my supressors and electronics intact, rather than risk lightning damage to have a toy lighting system operational. These products are simply toys, and are not made out of durable, commercial grade components. Welcome to the “Future”.

I bought this dimmer to control 400W of lighting in my home theater. The dimmer would shut itself off and become unresponsive to touch or remote signals, then come back on at random times. My best guess is that it was overheating (it would get quite hot) shutting itself off until it cooled sufficiently, then springing back to life. It would cycle on and off semi-randomly until switched off. The frustrating part was that you couldn’t shut it off when it was unconscious — you had to wait around for it to come back to life, and then turn it off. Not as entertaining as it sounds…

After getting tired of worrying whether this thing was going to burn down my house, I replaced it with a similar dimmer from Leviton (model HCM06-1D), and that has worked flawlessly. It also runs much cooler, both when switched on and when idle.

It’s possible I got the only bad SwitchLinc dimmer ever made, but I personally won’t be looking at them the next time around.

I originally bought about 70 of these when Insteon first came out (around 2003). Over the years I’ve bought another 20 or so. Of the original batch almost every single one has failed, either with a paddle problem (the paddle stops working) or by just failing completely (no power, no sign of activity — just as if the power were not connected). I have two stages of whole house power filtering (bought from Smarthome of course) and many other technology devices without similar failure rates.

There were a lot of firmware problems in the early units and they designed them so they could not be field upgraded. Mixing early with newer units in the same installation causes instability (it seems as if the signal isn’t ‘getting through’ but use of noise blocks and detailed analysis with an oscilliscope and insteon protocol analysis software indicates the units are transmitting over each other in violation of their own protocol spec). They appear to have fixed all these problems in newer units but if there are older units in the installation they intermittently ‘jam’ the signal and the subsequent automatic retransmissions causing user visible instability. I haven’t seen such failures in isolated tests of groups of newer units (the ones they started sending out in 2008 or so), the old units worked acceptably together as well, the big problems only occur when you mix old with new. These problems are well documented and discussed in the community, SmartHome claims they’ve “never heard of that sort of issue” right before the offer to sell you additional noise blocks. Noise is definitely a common issue even with Insteon, putting in noise blocks to solve specific problems is not a snake oil solution by any means, its just not a cure for buggy firmware.

The Insteon technology is much better than the ancient X10 technology. It is more reliable, responds faster, and has good scene control. Other vendors (such as Leviton) have much better made implementations of X10 units (build quality, reliability) than SmartHome, but they implement the X10 technology and suffer its defects.

Up until this year SmartHome was very generous and replaced the early units that failed even out of warranty. They changed this policy recently (per their new ‘Insteon Gold’ program) and no longer cover the original almost-out-of-beta quality units they shipped up through 2006-2007 except for failing paddles.

Despite the continuous drumbeat of replacing failed units over the years (under warranty or not) this is a good product and unless I was building a new home (where I could use a proper hard wired system made to more professional rather than consumer grade specs) I would install them again. I have recommended them to colleagues and friends for many smaller installations (<20 units) and they excel at that application. I learned to always keep one or two of each unit type in stock to have an immediate replacement for frequent failures. In a larger installation you will go insane reprogramming failed units w/o something like an ISY99 to manage the configuration (they are exponentially tedious and error prone to program manually as the installation size grows, especially if you are using KeypadLincs in the configuration).

I’m disappointed that SmartHome abandoned their original developers and customers as they tested their technology at our expense. I would not recommend buying any newly developed products from SmartHome/SmartLabs until they’ve been out a couple of years and they have had a chance to make them work.

There is currently nothing this cheap (to buy or install) with similar functionality on the market.