Something Really Electrically Strange In Our Home

[Chuck]

George,

I recently had a similar issue I was getting a flood of commands from somewhere and I couldn't track it down. Both my CM11a and LynX PLC were incapacitated with a flood of noise. Nothing worked. There was nothing in the log that showed any signals coming in. I figured my wife might have stuck a remote in a drawer somewhere and it had one of the buttons pressed. That was not the case.

I tried every trick in the book I could think of to make it work including turning off the electricity to the whole house in hopes of resetting whatever was causing the problem. I told my wife we were in total manual mode till I could figure it out.

One thing I did notice is that some of my nice Leviton switches that have the LED that blinks when there is a command coming in were blinking constantly. I had seen this once before many years ago in a similar situation. Due to some commitments I had to leave town for a week and didn't have time to troubleshoot the system.

When I got back I was too tired to take it on and went to bed. The next morning I woke up and noticed that the Leviton LEDs were not blinking constantly anymore. I tried the system and everything was back on line except one light. The basement light will not work anymore. It is one of the old X10 switches and nothing I do will make it work. I can manually turn it on and off at the switch but that is the only way it functions.

I have no conclusive proof of anything but I am guessing that that old X10 switch just died and flooded my system with lots of noise. I intend to replace it with a Z-wave module.

Like you, I am searching for something that is more stable. I am growing weary of constantly working on the system to keep it functional. In the last year or so the system has become increasingly more and more unreliable. I lose connections with interfaces, XTension freezes, and it takes forever to have a light come in so we are always turning on the lights manually.

Something has to change for my wife and I.

Chuck


On Oct 8, 2013, at 10:56 PM, George Handley <ghandley at kc.rr.com> wrote:

> Warren,
> 
> Thank you for your ideas. I hope I do understand the basics of PLC (X10) and this current crop of problems I'm experiencing, I've never seen. 
> 
> Like missed scheduled events. Certain lights not coming on or off in a long string of simple commands. Lots of things not working requiring the quitting and re-launching of XTension, and occasionally, the rebooting of my Mini running XTension. Getting rid of the whole house filter and new GFI cleaned things up 90%, but now there is still not the stability I had.
> 
> I run my XTension through a headless Mini using screen sharing, and tonight I discovered I accidentally restarted my iMac instead of the Mini in a last ditch effort to straighten things out.
> 
> When I finally got my iMac back up, I discovered re-booting it straightened out the XTension problems running on the Mini! I didn't need to restart the Mini. This is craziness.
> 
> I just need brute force of time to watch for a pattern. I'm sure it's something I did, but in places, it's brought my system to it's knees, and the whole house filter thing has really got me stymied.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> George
> 
> 
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