Insteon LED Bulb casuing erratic behavior with Indigo

I hope that this has not been discussed before - I could not find any similar tpoic when I searched.
I wanted to let the forum know of an issue I was having with Indigo and what ended up being a faulty Insteon LED bulb.

I started seeing some of my devices not working correctly and when I would review the log, I would see a "send failed" message. I also use apple home kit to communicate - and when I would tell Siri to "close the garage door" the response was that the message was sent - however, the garage door may instantly go down or, it may take 1-2 minutes to close - very slow. I would also see actions that normally would take 5-10 seconds to respond, take upwards of 1-2 minutes to complete.

I have a mac mini running indigo with a USB PowerLinc. I initially thought I may have noise on the line, or the Powerlinc was an issue. I unplugged a new UPS to ensire it was not line noise - which it was not. I also replace the PowerLinc USB with a new one I had as a spare. The linking process was a painful as it was again, very slow, taking several minutes to complete a device (using the start sync device links).

I had one dimmer switch that I was trying to define and sync with the new PowerLinc USB and it would never sync - I would see continuous "Linking - sending engine version request" and then the linking would finally fail. I decided to replace the dimmer switch - thinking it might be faulty. I tried doing a simple replace through the define and sync method - but it would always fail. So I decided to simply add the new switch ... again using the define and sync, I put the new dimmer switch address in the approriate boxes and click start - the define and sync would fail. HOWEVER, I did notice that after I would get the error message that indigo could not find the device, in the define and sync window the address was NOT the address I had typed in. I did a quick search and found that the device address that was being populated in the Define and Sync window was an INSTEON LED Bulb that was already part of my system.

I removed the bulb from the light outlet and restarted the define and sync for the new dimmer switch and it worked instantly! It seemed that the LED Bulb must have failed someway and was constantly communicating with the PowerLinc, slowing down the system.

I am not sure if there would have been a faster way to troubleshoot the problem - but I was really surprised to find that the Insteon LED Bulb was the problem. Now that the LED Bulb has been powered off - my system is back to its "lightning speed" as I expected.

I attached a portion of a log that shows the define and sync process ... and copied part of it here.

PowerLinc Linking - entered discovery linking mode (240 seconds)
PowerLinc Linking - syncing PowerLinc links (address 34.7A.7E)
PowerLinc Linking - . . adding: INSTEON plc link to controller 48.0E.DE, flags 03, group 01, data 00 00 FF
PowerLinc Linking - . . adding: (not added -- probably already exists)
PowerLinc Linking - . . adding: INSTEON plc link to controller 20.0E.DE, flags 03, group 01, data 00 00 FF
PowerLinc Linking - PowerLinc links updated
PowerLinc Linking - sync complete
PowerLinc Linking - received module button pressed from 20.2B.4E

As you can see I was trying to Define and Sync 48.0E.DE ... however, for some reason 20.2B.4E shows up in the process ... and this is the address of the INSTEON LED Bulb. The last line makes me believe the LEB Bulb was in some kind of constant "SET MODE". When I did eventually figure out the bulb was the problem - I turned it on and the bulb started going on and off. I removed the power from the light fixture and the INDIGO system errors went away.

So - if this is a know issue, sorry for posting about it!
If there is a way of troubleshooting a similar issue I would be appreciate someone enlighting me!

[jay (support)]

This is actually a unique (to me at least) failure case. Usually, when an Insteon device fails in a way that causes problems, it's because they just spew garbage which can sometimes be seen as X10 requests. However, it looks like your bulb failed in a way that was causing it to send out the "button pressed" signal (which is obviously wrong since the bulb doesn't have a button). Strange.

Not sure if there would have been any better way to diagnose the failure, though I think I would have started by turning off whole circuits first (except the one where the PowerLinc and Mac are) and then turning them back on one by one until you started seeing the failures again. That might have helped focus your efforts on a single device on a particular circuit (I always suspect signal noise as the first and primary reason for Insteon failures). But it may not have ended up being any faster than the approach you took.