I’m one of the users who migrated over to Home Assistant as part of Insteon’s collapse. I love Home Assistant, have become quite fluent with it, and consider my installation to be both expansive and stable.
Since migrating a couple years ago, I’ve accumulated quite the collection of “dead” Insteon devices. Like all hardware, these devices have a limited life and one after another has died of natural causes. As this has occurred, I replace these devices with Zwave, Shelly, or ESPHome devices and continue on my merry way. But there is no way I can find to remove these dead devices completely from Home Assistant. That is the topic of my post here.
The Insteon integration does not offer a way to remove devices that have died and no longer can be communicated with. This causes at least 2 issues:
The devices clutter up Home Assistant. I have disabled them to effectively hide them, and renamed their entities out of the way. But they are still there in the database. And the Insteon integration seems to still care about interrogating them for status, etc. This means it is working on devices it should not care about, and which are never going to respond.
The devices hurt Insteon network performance because other active devices, as well as the PLM, still have links to them. I can’t remove the links through the UI without the dead device responding to the unlink command.
Today, I’ve noticed I am having trouble communicating with devices that are alive and well on the network. And I think it is because of the backlog of communication with dead devices and timeouts occurring as a result.
Can anyone recommend how I’d go about carefully purging these devices from my PLM, and the Home Assistant database?
I made the switch from Insteon a while back but I switched all at once. I think I replaced all the switches, created new automations (to replace the PLM logic), turned off the PLM, then removed the Insteon integration. Done. Not going back.
Thanks. Sounds like you ditched the hardware and replaced it all? If so, awesome. But in my case I’m actually using the hardware and PLM alongside newer Zwave, Shelly, ESPHome, etc. So I need to be able to live with it until the last device dies.
I have disabled them in HA, but I do not know how to remove them from the PLM using the Insteon integration in HA. I suspect that I need to do one of the following:
(a) Install an Insteon PLM CLI toolset on the HA device and use it via SSH; or
(b) Pull the Insteon PLM out of the HA device, physically connect it to my Mac, and use some 3rd party management tool on my Mac to manipulate the ALDB on it.
I know you are looking for a “surgical” way to remove the devices, but I don’t know how to do this with the current Integration or tools.
You may find more information here:
And the GitHub community may have some suggestions.
The “nuclear” option would be to remove the Insteon integration, factory reset the PLM, initiate auto discovery of your Insteon devices that are still alive, etc… essentially, start from scratch. But I think there could be devices and entities left in HA that would have to be purged prior to getting what you want (I’ve seen duplicate entities when re-adding devices that had to be removed).
Thanks @MaxK . It looks like insteon-terminal has the capability to force removal of a PLM link without needing to handshake with the (dead) device. I’m going to see if I can install it into the HA device and use it via SSH.
@teharris1 is not in this thread, but I’d love to request a feature in the Insteon integration where the insteon.delete_all_link Service could be told not to require the “handshake” with the device, but instead just removes it from the PLM. I believe this is what I need to do to get rid of these dead devices.
I have a pull request in that includes the ability to remove a device from the network. It just started to get reviewed. Not sure if it will make it into the April release or not.
Nice! Thank you @teharris1 – I’ll keep an eye out for that. Once a device is gone from the PLM’s ALDBm will that device effectively get removed (or be manually removeable) from HA by the Insteon integration?
The ability to remove a device will be in the May release. This feature will remove all reference to the device in the modem, HA and all other Insteon devices (optional).
FYI, the option to delete Insteon devices did make it into the May release. If you go to the Insteon configuration panel (Settings → Devices & Services → Insteon → Configure) you will have 2 options to delete a device.
Click on the device in the list of Insteon devices. In the upper right corner under the three dots menu is the option to “Delete”
Click on the “Utilities” tab then the “Delete device” option and enter the Insteon address of the device to delete.
The first option is the easier option for devices that were once active in HA but are not removed / dead. The second option is for any device, especially those that were never in HA and don’t show up in the HA device list.