apostolakisl

If you directly connect two legs of 120v split phase you have a pure short and your breaker must pop in milliseconds or it isn't working right. MWBC or otherwise doesn't matter, pure short should pop "instantly" or it isn't doing its job of protecting your house. A pure short can very quickly destroy the wire, especially if you have any splices that aren't perfect. A pure short that persists for a few seconds would be nasty. It could easily be hundreds of amps going through some little 14 or 12 wire. Those curves are meant to prevent transient and reasonable over-currents from popping breakers, like the inflow rush of turning on a vacuum, not a full out short. I would propose perhaps, if you connected the neutral wire coming off a load from one leg to the hot wire on the other leg, then you would get a 240 voltage going to that appliance and (with resistance appliance) a double amp which could put you at the edge and let it warm up the wire if it ran for a few seconds before popping. Probably also destroy your appliance. Either way, if he was in "over his head" then that is on him. In summary, knowing where all the wires go and labeling can never be a bad thing. EDIT: It did occur to me that if it was a 20amp breaker and 14 gauge wire (of course not code) you would have enough resistance in the wire to prevent an "instant" popping of the breaker. This is actually the reason for #12 wire on a 20amp breaker. #14 can handle 20 amps, it just won't blow a 20amp breaker as quickly as it should when shorted.

Exactly what I had suggested before it was labeled as ~don't ever do that. Trace out the wires so you know what goes where and then label it for all future activity. And then of course once you know what goes where, there isn't really any excuse for connecting them wrong.

He didn't do what I said or, despite tracing out the wires and knowing where they go, did something quite clueless in splicing two hots together from different circuits. I would assume he did not trace out the wires but rather just started hooking things up wrong. Plus, he would have had to shut off two breakers to get the power off, another clue. I would also suggest replacing your sons breakers. If they didn't trip prior to melting wire then they are bad. It is very unlikely that two different circuits are going to the same switchbox. If the switchbox is handling many switches, the chances go up, but if there is only one switch, then chances are pretty much zero. Even if there are lots of switches, it would be very rare that two circuits are feeding it. Nothing wrong with taking pictures and I highly encourage (do it myself all the time), but the cat is out of the bag on this one. He already didn't take pictures and disconnected. Knowledge of the wire runs is never a bad thing and with said knowledge you then correctly connect them.

An electrician could probably look at this and figure out very quickly what wires are what. The novice will get confused and it is difficult to communicate these things over a forum. A simple, but slightly tedious process can be undertaken to figure it out without requiring any of the intuition achieved from experience. Turn off the Power of course 1) Open up all switch boxes and fixture boxes involved. 2) Disconnect every single splice/fixture so you just have individual wires poking out and not touching anything. 3) Clip your ohm meter to two wires (might choose black and bare ground) that are in the same jacket at any of the locations. Select the ohm meter to make a tone on short. 4) Now go one by one through your other locations and tap together <black and bare ground> wires until you hear your ohm meter beeping. Now you have established one run of wire. 5) Label the wires and move onto the next set of jacketed wires until you have tracked down each run of wire. Once you know every run of wire, the rest should be easy.

I don't know how these wifi bulbs work exactly having never used one, but I just suspect that with 100 or so of them, it would be a PITA of mega proportions to link them all and maintain it. I would have to create a whole new subnet just for them and I suspect that might be the easiest part. Should I use "dumb" bulbs then I just use a handful of "smart" switches, several of which I have already installed. Those wifi bulbs look very nice and maybe I'll consider them at home. But at church, I just want orange when dim and soft white when bright. I was able to find another website (bulbsdepot.com) that sells the Philips bulbs under a slightly different model number. I suspect the ones at HD are specially packaged for HD versions of the same thing. I ordered one to try it out. Shipping is flat rate $9.95 for 1 or 100. This bulb lists the dimmed color at 2200K and the full bright at 2700K.

The Cree one I think would pass muster with the aesthetic critics, but the price is going to be an issue being 3x the price of the Phillips and fewer lumens. Really I would never use most of the features and I'm looking at a rather daunting task of linking ~70 bulbs to the wifi. But then again, these are available and the Phillips are not. I have been really really happy with all the Cree commercial fixtures I own (3 different styles and many of them), and have been hugely disappointed with all the Cree retail lights I have owned. Not sure where these bulbs fall. Every single Cree screw-in bulb I have ever bought failed far earlier than rated. Like 1/10th rated or less.

The bulbs are exposed in wall sconces and chandeliers, so they have to look like regular incandescent bulbs. To the best of my knowledge, smart bulbs don't look like that. I can promise you, if I try to swap out bulbs with something that looks funny, I will hear about it. But maybe what you speak of do look OK, you'd have to give me an example.

Thanks. That is the wrong base, but I found it online with the correct base. They don't stock it, so I'll have to order them. Hopefully they look like they say. I don't really care if they don't dim smooth to zero, that doesn't matter. In fact, I would be fine if they just had two settings, dimmed and orange, bright and soft white. EDIT: Can't get it. Out of stock everywhere.

How about candelabra bulbs? I really need a nice looking one to use in my church. The bulbs are exposed in chandeliers so they have to look good. We have 6 chandeliers with 12x 60 watt bulbs each. They are split onto two dimmers. I can't automate them with because of the 1500 watts per switch. Plus we'd like to take the electric bill down if possible, usually using the AC here so basically when we have all the lights on (we have a bunch more that aren't on chandeliers) it is like running a 5000 watt space heater while running the AC. The priest wants bulbs that turn orange when dimmed for night services, and none of the led's I have come across do that, even the ugly ones.

Rf works very well all by its lonesome. I have bridged buildings on separate utility connections using rf only with great success. Failing plms on the other hand have become ubiquitous. I also referring you to the thread using a Rpi and USB RF dongle where error free operation is reported.

Good to see that UD took that route. I am very pleased that it accepts USB plm. I think I will pick up a couple of the USB sticks. My suspicion is that these lack the failure mode of the line voltage PLM's.

Might see if you can make the error say something like "that portal account already registered" instead of that jargon.

What is up with this? I have two ISY's on the same portal account and when I tried to login to the portal to add the second ISY, I got this. Also, unlrealted question, I don't see any place to input the lan ip address but it does have you enter the lan ssid. Is the purpose of this that UD mobile will search the lan when connected to that ssid?

Last I heard, ISY running on Polyisy wasn't going to support Insteon, at least not natively. Has this changed? I as well have Polyisy pro and that was pretty much because I bought it in the initial roll out at a special price. The wifi would be useful if you wanted to put the polisy somewhere without ethernet, but I don't see that this is so useful. For the most part, I would expect Polyisy to be sitting next to your router. I have no idea what bluetooth application would run on polisy, but lets say they come up wtih something. Obviously this is a fairly short range radio so Polisy would need to be close to your phone or whatever bluetooth device you intend on using with it. Now, perhaps the best place to put polyisy is not next to your router or some other ethenet source but rather near the other bluetooth device, so wifi comes in handy. But first, UD has to devise some useful bluetooth application.

FYI, I was offline as well on Sunday morning. Two different ISY's.

@Kevin Connolly Nice work. I ordered the parts to do it even though I don't need it, just in case stuff. If you have the dupont connector stuff I might suggest just cutting your cat6 wire and put the connector pieces directly on to the end of the cat6 instead of using that rj45 pin out connector. That would cut down a bunch on clutter. When I bought the dupont stuff for myself I was so wondering why I didn't do it earlier. Makes stuff so much easier and cleaner.

Well, yes, but also the ones with bad caps consistently fail right at 2 years. So, assuming you put it into service at the time you bought it, then this would be spot on for a cap failure. Should the version number be prior to the new design, that together with 2 years in service would confirm with very high probability that you have a dying plm. @Michaelv

As is the case regardless of how the PLM is connected, when you change out a plm, you have to do a "restore plm" from the ISY console. If you go back to the old one, then you once again have to do a "restore plm".

So the other question is if you do a soft reboot of ISY, does it affect the power on the internal header that you might be using to power your rpi?

@Michel Kohanim Can you comment on the pin out for the internal header socket? specifically, uart or rs232 pins that might be there? Also, would it overload the power supply if you had both a z-wave and a pi zero at its lowest baseline power draw (.4 watts per my google search).

I take it then that the header socket there on ISY does not have any RS232 or UART connectivity? I believe somewhere you mentioned that Michel gave you the pinout? Looked up Raspberry PI zero power. Without any accessory stuff on, (wifi, hdmi, etc) it only uses .4 watts.

Very nice work. Wondering, is there not somewhere that you can tap into the rs232 terminals on the ISY board instead of doing the U-Turn Cat6? Also you are tapping into that header. Does this not interfere if there is a z-wave board? EDIT: Trying to look at photos to figure out. The z-wave board goes into the bottom row of sockets and it looks like you tapped into the top row. Are the top row and bottom row sharing the same electrical contacts? I don't see enough pins soldered into the board for the top row and bottom row to be different and obviously the top row isn't just empty since you are using them. EDIT AGAIN: I also have to wonder if there isn't somewhere you can tap directly into ISY UART and avoid the RS232 entirely.

You may be right. It wouldn't make sense to list it as compatible with 50hz if it weren't compatible with 220/240v. There only a handful of obscure countries in the world that use 120v/50hz.

Options as I see it. 1) Get your hands on an Insteon PLM, use a voltage converter and see if it works. 2) Ditch Insteon and go with Z-wave along with ISY 3) Ditch ISY and stay with Insteon using some other non-plm interface. The HUB is listed as working with 50hz, however it only lists125v Personally, I suspect the PLM with a voltage adapter probably will work based on RF.

That sounds like what my assumption was. Transmit on zero cross, accept at any time.