Force removal of switch from scene?

[billberner]

I have a scene that is controlled by maybe 6 switches, only one of which is actually wired to the load (some lights) controlled by the scene. That switch failed completely so the scene stopped working, could not turn the lights on at all.

I got another dimmer switch to replace the dead one. I wanted to remove the old one from the scene and then delete it from the hub before swapping it out, but it does not respond at all so that was not possible. I replaced it with the new switch, added the new switch to the scene, but now the hub "thinks" the old switch is still a member of that scene.

Things seem to work OK, but any time I want to make a change to that scene, I get an error message saying the dead switch could not be put into linking mode and I need to press "skip" to move on. That seems to happen several times for every device in the scene, so this is a real pain.

So my question is whether anyone knows a way to force the removal of a switch from a scene and the hub when there is no way to power it on? Do any third party SW apps offer the ability to "mimic" a dead device so it could at least be removed from the system? I would not mind paying something to get this cleaned up.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[RPSalty]

From my experience, cardinal sin. You must remove all the devices from the scene, and while maybe not necessary delete the scene. Reboot and refresh the App. The reason for this, and I'll be corrected I'm sure, is that all the other devices in the scene are still linked to the old switch. Since the old switch isn't functioning, it's necessary to break the links of the other devices. It's also necessary to reboot and refresh as the App isn't polling devices live, an action has to happen for the App to recognize the state of the device. If you don't break the links, then you will have a lot of activity on the system as it tries to find the removed switch until it gives up.

To your actual question, remove the old switch from the HUB. Per a conversation with tech support a few years back, NO, but they can do it. If you are using IOS, you may be able to, but I have Android and could never see what the tech could see.

Once all the links are removed, rename the scene to something else before trying to delete it. Don't skip the reboot and refresh. Create another scene and add all your devices. Your old switch will still be there, just ignore it.

You could investigate Home Assistant if you really want to get rid of it, but this is a convoluted solution, and I can't be certain you would be able to remove the old switch. I used Home Assistant when the HUBs went offline. Home Assistant identified all my devices and I think displayed a table of the HUB devices. But Home Assistant is a work around of the Insteon servers, I don't think any actual HUB programming is possible.

- I seem to recall I've seen the dialog, "device not responding, do you want to force remove" or something like that. If you have access to the original app, after deleting all the other switches in the scene, try deleting the broken switch from the scene and then delete the switch in All Devices.