Zick

Yup, had wife move branch connection around and didn't see any change. Going to solder up the connections and call it good. It's been about 3 days with the other keypadlinc in place and no sign of fault yet.

When I did this test, I got .6 ohms.

Sometimes you have to get creative. I have not needed to do this often, but I have sometimes tied hot and neutral together (obviously, no power) at at one termination point (box or panel) and measured resistance between hot and neutral conductors at the other end. Other times, I might add a length of conductor between one location and another so that I could reach both ends with the probes. Yes! Nice. Yellow identifies the circuit(s) powering only insteon switches. No lights. No refrigerators. I would imagine that you could even power a whole house' worth of unloaded insteon switches from a single circuit breaker. Yellow, then, becomes partly a control circuit. Sometimes, even electricians have good ideas. Thank you for that idea of tying the wires together. It's seems so obvious now, which is why I probably didn't think of it.

The only knowledge I have of this would be part of the keypad literature. I think it is typically +/-10%, but you can check. My suspicion is that if your issues are connector related, it would be more about transient and intermittent conditions rather than just pure peak voltages. My suspicion, further, is that the conditions at your house are simply revealing some weakness (rather, lack of robustness) in the keypad design. Others have pointed to posts about similar problems and persistent failures, but I suspect a vast majority experience very limited and random failures. I take this as an indication that some houses have minor wiring issues that don't bother most electrical devices, but could affect those electronic devices designed without a lot of margin. Perhaps smarthome devices are one of the latter (pure speculation based on your experience here). Depending on how much work you want to put into this, and how comfortable you are with electrical, one option is to measure resistance between the switch location hot, and the circuit breaker. If possible, measure this resistance while moving the branch connector. My experience is that this resistance will be well below 1 ohm. Heed LeeGs advice here with regards to being careful. I also don't know why your electrician used yellow, but I understand that this is code compliant. Most of us are used to black and red because of this being the common colors in sheathed electrical cable, but I don't believe yellow is a restricted color (like white or green). Red, blue, black, yellow, orange, and red are, I believe, ungrounded conductors by code. That is how I would do it, being sure to make sure everything is cleaned and flux is applied. One thing I have found about wire nuts is that they work best when the wirenut threads engage EVERY conductor. With 4+ conductors, this can sometimes be tricky. Ok, I was just checking on the voltage changes because we have a Geothermal unit that causes the lights to dim slightly when it kicks on. I had checked with our Electric Comp and they said the voltage drop was within spec. Here is what he said exactly; As far as checking the resistance between the wall switch hot and breaker, I have no problems trying this but how can I measure this when the distance between the two locations is about 50+ feet away? Also, I think I remember why the reason for the yellow wire. It is actually only on Insteon devices around the house since the switches are completely separate from any electrical outlet and the outlets have the normal red/black color scheme.

Hi Lee, That was actually one of the first things I did was to check all the neutral and ground screws on the bus bars. I found some that were about 1/4 to 1/2 turn from being really snugged down tight.

Have you asked him? No I haven't yet, but does it really matter if he used Yellow instead of Red?

Hi oberkc, The hot wires that branch out are in fact tied together by a wire nut and "appeared" to be a good connection. I suppose I could solder them together althought I'm not sure what method would be the best which this many wires coming together? Should I just leave the wires twisted and solder them up as it, kind of like this? You mentioned voltage changes (drop/increase). Just how much change in voltage would be acceptable and not to cause any damage?

The other thing that is strange and leads me to believe it might be defective keypadlincs is that I have multiple Switchlincs connected to the same circuit and none of those have experienced any issues. All the keypadlincs are V5.0. These all could have been possible "defective" for a while now because the only time the problem shows up is when the power is removed and readded such as a power outage (which usually don't happen much or when I'm not around). Then after a while they go back to normal or at least most did. I don't appear to be the only one with this issue; http://www.smarthome.com/FORUM/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=9145 http://www.smarthome.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8997 http://www.smarthome.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=9388

This is how it's setup. Thanks for the information.

Well I took a chance and put yet another good keypadlinc into that spot and so far nothing has happened. But I've now have a total of 5 that are shorting out. One that is completely toast and 4 others that short out for a while but then stabilze. This is not looking good for only 2 1/2 years in operation.

So I should be OK, because my neutrals don't branch out to different circuits. All wall boxes are home run conduits and don't tie into other conduits. There is a lot of conduit here The hot wire is basically the same except that they all tie together right before connecting to the single breaker.

Sorry, I don't have this problem on my HTC Desire. But I do notice that when the screen first loads, the on/off buttons shift around a bit but then go where they're suppose to. I have always used Conductor.

Some info I found, maybe relevant or maybe not. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=790713

Ok, I'm going to take a step back here a second because after thinking about this again and doing some reading I might be wrong about the neutrals being on the same phase. My understanding was that the hot wire would make the difference for the phase depending on which leg the breaker was connected to. I was thinking that since all the neutrals wired into the neutral bus bar that they would be the same but maybe I'm mistaken. Can someone explain how I can 100% verify if my neutral are in fact on the same phase? Thanks

I have actually done this already but I was using the two keypadlinc that were experiencing the issue. I'm hesitent to put a known good one in that location but afraid I might have to... Hello Zick, It is possible for line voltage to be very rapidly changing, faster than the response time of your meter. An oscilloscope or a fast recording meter are required to determine that. Since you have a test cord would it be possible to try this in a neighbors house or at work? This might help you isolate/identify your power quality as the possible issue. I am curious about the yellow (hot) wire. Yellow seem unusual, unless it might be associated with a uninterruptible power source? I am using a Fluke 88-5 to take the readings although not as useful as an oscilloscope might be for this test. I can try and take the possibly damaged keypadlincs to another location to test. But if their already damaged, then they would act the same way at the other location I would think. Also, I don't know the exact reason for using the yellow wire. My FIL who is a Electrical Engineer did all of our wiring.