Repair defective Insteon switches

[upstatemike]

Cliff/Digger, thanks for the specs on the Digikey switches. I ordered 100 of them and have been feverishing working to get my switches working. Eight changed thus far and no problems.

The majority of my switches are dimmers and in my first attempt, I just finessed the boards out of the case, carefully bending the three leads that connect to the triac. Bad move. I ended up breaking one (at the bottom). Very difficult to reconnect (i.e. resolder).

On the remaining dimmers, I very carefully clipped the three leads and pulled the board out to work on it. After I was done, I soldered them together and checked to make sure it was solid before closing everything up.

I test everything out on each switch before it goes into service and it has all been working very well so far.

If there's anyone out there who is not willing to try to fix their switches, I would be willing to purchase dimmers that have the contact issue.

The dimmers are a real pia to repair. I have about 10 or 12 left that I have not repaired that are sitting in a box.

Instean of clipping the pins I was thinking of trying a SMT hot air desoldering tool to heat the three connections at once and pull the leads from the board but I havent had a chance to try that.

Maybe I'm just lucky but I've had 100+ switches installed for over a year and have yet to have a SwitchLinc fail.

Yes you are lucky. I just had a switch fail this past weekend... the 2-year warranty ended in February. I had a brand new spare on the shelf that I had purchased at the same time. It was bad also.

 

[jhimmel]

Maybe I'm just lucky but I've had 100+ switches installed for over a year and have yet to have a SwitchLinc fail.

You are lucky beyond all belief.
At this point, I don't think I have many of my originally purchased switches left. I have RMA'd about 25. Obviously my initial purchases were at a time when they had a horrible batch of tact switches.

Jim H.

 

[TonyNo]

Heh. To balance this out a bit, I have had one dimmer failure in the two years I've had them.

 

[RandyKnight]

Heh. To balance this out a bit, I have had one dimmer failure in the two years I've had them.

Seriously, the whole failure /reliability thing seems like an Internet myth to me. Not saying that it is and I'm sure those of you who have had issues are not making them up. But my stuff has been rock solid.

KeyPadLincs OTOH have sucked for me. The interesting thing is they don't "Fail". They just lock up whenever we have a power outage (which happens a lot where I live). I usually can get them to reset by turning off the breaker, but I have had to actually pull them out, disconnect the hot, then hook it back up. Weird.

In fact I'm in the process of pulling them all out and just using dimmers where I had loads on them and will likely do something different where I have them as just slaves. Rad I/O maybe .... that would be slick. Or since I'm using HomeSeer and the M1, I could put in UPB keypads. I really like the lighted ones from HAI.

 

[upstatemike]

Interesting. I only have 1 KeypadLinc that has problems with power outages. Fortunately the ISY lets me restore it very quickly. Switches on the other hand seem to go bad in batches. I just found another bad one tonight (for a total of 8 in the past 2 weeks). All the bad ones are right around 2 years old and usually have ver2.0 or ver 2.1 stickers on them.

 

[jhimmel]

Heh. To balance this out a bit, I have had one dimmer failure in the two years I've had them.

Seriously, the whole failure /reliability thing seems like an Internet myth to me. Not saying that it is and I'm sure those of you who have had issues are not making them up. But my stuff has been rock solid.

KeyPadLincs OTOH have sucked for me. The interesting thing is they don't "Fail". They just lock up whenever we have a power outage (which happens a lot where I live). I usually can get them to reset by turning off the breaker, but I have had to actually pull them out, disconnect the hot, then hook it back up. Weird.

I believe it all has to do with what batch your switches came from. I pretty much outfitted my whole house with Insteon switches within a 1 month period (late 12/05 and early 01/06). People who bought around that time seem to have had a lot of failures. Interestingly enough, I bought my Keypadlincs around that same time, and they have not given me a bit of trouble. Go figure.

I started keeping track of all my failed switches and their locations in the house. So far, I have not had to replace a switch TWICE yet - so MAYBE the improved tact switches are working. It will take more time to be sure though.

All of my failures have been Switchlinc dimmers, Switchlinc relays, Icon relays, and one PLC. The replacement PLC has worked well for quite a while, and I have yet to lose a Lamplinc, Appliancelinc, or a Keypadlinc. The vast majorety of my failures have been from the infamous paddle failure. I have 8 more that have been pulled and ready to return right now, bringing my total switch failures to over 30.

Jim H.

 

[TonyNo]

Digger, do you have any of those Omron switches left? I finally pulled my problem dimmer to fix and repurpose.

 

[TonyNo]

I need only two. Let me know how many I need to buy!

 

[az1324]

I also may want to get a half dozen or so if you've got em.

 

[TonyNo]

Wow. I just popped one of the switches off of the board and opened it up. The snap dome had so much gunk on it, I had to scrape it with the meter lead to get continuity. FYI, this is an 0603 v1.1 dimmer.

 

[az1324]

That'll do it.

Yeah I'm starting to get more unresponsive paddles... usually just one of the switches. Most of mine were not purchased through smarthome and are going on 2 years old but I haven't tried to get Smarthome to fix them.

 

[az1324]

Dear Valued INSTEON® Customer,

We have identified and corrected an issue with the manufacturing process that has lead to failure of the manual operation of a very limited number of our INSTEON-compatible Décora-style wall dimmers and relays. If you have any units which do not respond to manual paddle presses, please call our Customer Solution Center @ 800.762.7846 for a warranty replacement.

Smarthome stands behind every product we sell. Rest assured that should your switches experience this behavior in the future, Smarthome will extend the warranty for this issue for an additional 5 years. For example, we will extend 1-year warranties to 6 years, 2-year warranties to 7 years, and 7-year warranties to 12 years for this issue.

We hope this announcement has been helpful and apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you. We are committed to bringing you a wide range of quality, innovative INSTEON products.

Sincerely,

The Smarthome Team

Just saw this e-mail. Still might not help me that much because I purchased most of my switches through AO.

 

[compuguru]

I have one SwitchLinc Timer that is failing to turn off using the switch (remote works fine). I might want to try and do the replacement. Anyone got an extra switch or two?

 

[sorka]

I have 6 failed ICON switches that I bought 5 years ago. I've tried a dozen times to get SH to replace them out of warranty and they've consistently refused. Because of this, I arrested my insteon expansion and have not bought any more switches since. If they've finally come around, I'd start buying SH products again.

The last time I called them on this was in April. Is this this a recent development? Should I call them again?

 

[sorka]

Update. Just called SH again and apparently this is for real. They're replacing *ALL* of the icon switches in one shot with V2s....even the ones that haven't failed. The CS rep said it was just a matter of time before they failed and offered to do them all now.

It really seems SH has turned their act around. I hope they can maintain financial viability and survive.