NeilP

Thanks Teken. Same to you. Neil

Hi Teken.....yes, I agree this is a safety feature. After reading all the reports on the web about house fires started by electric blankets I can understand why Sunbeam added this functionality to their blankets. arw01...your control of your blanket is exactly what I had in mind. This would have significantly increased the WAF of my Insteon/ISY adventures. For the time being I will set my Insteon switches to beep about 30 minutes before bedtime as a reminder and then physically get up and go turn on the blanket. Sort of like being back in the Stone Age. Neil

Hi everyone, We recently purchased an electric blanket to keep us warm through the cold northern winters here in .ca (although this winter has been remarkably mild for us). I had intended to have my ISY automatically turn on the blanket a short time before bedtime so the bed is nice and toasty by the time we get into it. However it turns out that the electric blanket controls are not a simple mechanical on/off switch with a triac level control. There appears to be some sort of micro-controller built into the control module with a momentary contact switch controlling power on/off. When I turn on the blanket by pressing the switch, then unplug the blanket power cord and plug it back into the wall power receptacle (simulating an Appliancelinc controlling on/off) the blanket does not come back on. So it seems that a simple interruption of ac power by an Appliancelinc will not work here. Any suggestions from anyone to get around this? (no smart-alec suggestions about other ways of generating heat, thank you ). The blanket is new and under warranty so I do not want to modify the controller just now but would consider it in the future. Thanks in advance. Neil

Thanks Michel

I have just joined the ranks of people with deceased PLMs. My 2413S failed for good yesterday after exhibiting some strange behaviour that some of you on this Forum indicated as a potential failure. It was about 3 years old so I guess it lasted longer than most. Thanks to some of the informative posts here I will try reviving it with some capacitor replacements when I get some time. In the meanwhile I had a spare Ezicomm 5010K PLM which I pressed into service. Unfortunately I seem to be getting erratic operation on my network with status changes of various devices not being reported properly in the Admin Console. I did follow proper procedure in sequentially powering up the PLM and then the ISY, then doing a File/Restore Modem. Diagnostics do show that the ISY recognizes that a PLM is connected but the PLM Links table is empty. Any thoughts on how I can resolve this? Thanks Neil

Does anyone know if the new Ezicomm PLM for the Ezio8sa is compatible with the ISY? Some background to this question....I am replacing some defective Ezio2x4s with two Ezio8sa. I already have an Ezio8sa. The original Ezicomm PLM that came with the Ezio8sa did not work well with my ISY. It would not automatically update status changes for the inputs of the Ezio8sa. The solution was to use a 2413S Rev 9B PLM (thanks to LeeG for his help solving that one). My vendor tells me that the new Ezicomm PLM now works OK with the current firmware version of the ISY. I would like to confirm that independently if possible hence this question to the Forum. Thanks Neil

Apostolakis....valid point about a single ground reference. Your example about two ground points on opposite sides of a house is another example about how one has to modify their thinking regarding high energy surges and voltage drop across house wiring during those surges. In my particular case I have a single point ground at the electrical entrance to my house for all utilities entering my house. But because I live in a rural area I also get my water supply from a well which is at the opposite end of my house from the main panel. The electrical code requires that the well casing be bonded to the house grounding system which I have done. However I have to imagine that the 90 foot deep steel casing is a far superior ground than the 12 foot ground rod by my panel. All I can hope is that in the event of a surge that Kirchoff's Law of Current Division applies and that the overall combination of 10 feet of 6 gauge wire to my ground rod is significantly less impedance to ground than the fifty foot run of 12 gauge bonding wire to my well casing. Neil

Raymondh......I have three APC brand UPSs in my house each isolated by a Filterlinc. The UPSs were definite signal suckers which I confirmed by testing when I had an X10 only network. I assume that they would also suck Insteon signal if they were not isolated by the Filterlincs. There is no list of non-signal sucking power strips that I know of. One way to identify one is to first look at the manufacturers advertised specs for EMI or noise filtering. This implies the presence of a signal sucking capacitor. The best way is to actually test one. A simple test originally proposed by another forum member and the way that I test them is to connect a 9V battery and voltmeter across the line terminals of the power strip. The voltmeter will read 9V, then remove the battery and watch the voltmeter display. If the display drops immediately to zero volts then there is no capacitor across the line terminals, if the voltmeter takes a second or so to drop to zero then there is a capacitor there evidenced by the fact that it is holding a momentary charge after the battery is disconnected. The longer the period of decay the bigger the capacitor the worse the signal sucking capability. BTW an old analog voltmeter is best for this test, or else a good fast acting digital voltmeter. The cheap $10-20 DVMs do not sample fast enough to catch the decay. Neil

Hi Teken....good comment about protection being different than a GFCI. The MOVs are wired in parallel across the line(s) and ground as are any loads but when one is considering high level surges even though they are of brief duration they can have extremely high voltage and current. At that point the inductance/resistance/capacitance of the powerline must be taken into account whereas under normal operation the power line can be considered almost transparent. This is the real rationale for having a whole home surge suppressor at the entrance to the house to drain off the majority of the transient energy entering the house and then relying on the voltage drop experienced by the remaining transient as it travels down the household power line until it gets to the smaller capacity surge suppressors at each point of use which drain off the remainder of the transient energy. I suspect that most of the point of use units will provide good protection for items downstream of the suppressor but minimal protection for items upstream of the protector for this reason. Just reinforcing the fact that it is not an either/or choice for whole home and point of use suppression but a matter of having both types of protection. Then of course protection on incoming cable tv and telephone lines must be considered also but that is another topic in itself. Neil

Taken.....I noticed on your Brultech blog (which I found extremely interesting BTW) that you used some Leviton surge suppressor receptacles. I had planned on using those also but the Leviton web page states that the units have noise filtering built in which means that they would act a some sort of signal sucker. Have you noticed any Insteon signal deterioration due to these units? Neil

I have an Eaton CHSPT2 Ultra whole home surge protector on my main panel. I also have a number of point-of-use Belkin single outlet surge protectors on various appliances in the house to minimize spikes into the line from those appliances. I also have a couple of EZIO4x2s plugged directly into the same type of Belkin units. I did modify all of the Belkin units to remove the filter capacitor from them to prevent "signal sucking". The Eaton unit did not have any noise filter in it. I cant say that I have experienced any Insteon signal deterioration due to the surge suppressor units. I test the suppressors with the battery and voltmeter technique described by another poster on this forum. That works quite well to identify if a unit has a capacitor in it. I also use an electronic Megger meter and recording DVM that I have to test the actual surge suppression capability of the units. The Megger puts out a selectable high DC voltage which drives the internal MOVs into conduction. The recording DVM captures the maximum voltage that occurs when the MOVs start to clamp. One has to convert from VAC RMS to DC to compare measured performance to published specification and my test results never meet spec but at least they do indicate that the MOVs are working giving me some level of confidence that it is worthwhile installing these units. For the record, the whole home unit does clamp at a higher voltage than the point of use units....which is as it should be. Neil

I have a Macromatic Time Delay relay TR-60226 connected to a spare input port on my EZIO8SA. The delayed-on interval is set to 4 minutes to allow household power as well as my Insteon network time to stabilize after power is turned back on. Upon receipt of an ON message from the EZIO a program runs in the ISY to send me a notification that my Insteon network is back up. In my case I had a 12 VAC version of this relay leftover from a previous project so I am powering it with a small step-down transformer from line voltage. The relay is available for different supply voltages if desired. Neil

Makes perfect sense now. I had forgotten about folks who get a modem/router from their ISP. As this thread has shown there is lots to consider when one is trying to manage not only the basic home automation processes but also the ability of the HA network to recover from negative external events such as power failures, etc. Neil

Xathros......I'm a little confused by your second paragraph. I assume that you are getting your device static IPs from your router, not your ISP. Or am I wrong? Not sure why you say no DNS required unless you are also getting a static IP for your internet line from your ISP. Neil

This is an interesting sidebar. I wonder if this possibly contributed to my original problem. I have always used IP address reservation based on MAC ID in my router but I also had selected "enable internet access" under File. (I agree with Nadler, it seems counter-intuitive to de-select this option) I also noticed that in the Configuration tab under Network Settings that Automatic (DHCP) was selected, not UPnP. Seems that a bit more documentation should be provided on this point. Neil