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

Xathros....I filed an official trouble ticket with UDI. They had me upgrade to 4.2.5. Now my ISY seems to reboot properly without hanging up. I will have to keep an eye on it going forward to see if that solved the problem. larryllix.....no, I had not considered Aartech and yes, they are an excellent company to deal with. I will send them a note. Neil

Xathros...switching the low voltage output of the wall warts makes sense. I could do that for my ISY but I also want to switch the PLM which of course is plugged directly into a receptacle. I may have to switch a slaved low voltage relay to control power to a separate receptacle for the PLM. I too would prefer to just mount the DIN Relay on my backboard with all the terminals exposed. ...also while trying out the admin console reboot function that you told me about I have found that my ISY does not successfully reboot every time. It frequently hangs up with both TX and RX leds on full. I will contact UDI about this directly. Teken...your comment about poor after-sales support is timely. I emailed the company about if I could purchase their products from a Canadian distributor and have not received any response yet. johnnyt....where did you purchase your unit from? Did you get it from a Canadian source or direct from the US? I would like to avoid the hassle of customs and duty etc. Neil

Teken and Xathros, Sorry for the late response to your replies.......I was busy chainsawing and transporting to the local dump all of the trees that were downed by the storm that caused my power outage. All finished now. Thanks for the info on the DIN Relay and Web power switch. Both units look interesting to me. Each has benefits and drawbacks. The web power switch appears to switch only one power source for all outlets. In my case I needed to power cycle both the PLM on basic household power and the ISY on UPS power. The advantage however is a nice self-contained package. By contrast the DIN Relay appears to switch whatever is connected to the individual relays but would then need some sort of enclosure/outlets. I have sent an email to the manufacturer asking if they have a Canadian distributor for their products. Xathros....are you switching both line voltage and low voltage devices with the DIN Relay? Do you have the relay unit in an enclosure to safely protect the line voltage connections? I could envision an enclosure with switched outlets and multiple power input for basic and UPS power. Teken....the link to your house project has some very interesting stuff on it. I have to take some time now to digest all the info but it seems that you have touched on many topics that I have considered for my house. Xathros...thanks for telling me where to find the reboot button in the admin console. It works! Also thanks for the tip about Remote Desktop. In my case I have my UPS configured to turn off my PC after being on battery power for 5 minutes under the rationale that I would rather have my ISY and networking gear stay up as long as possible in a power outage. I may have to re-think that approach. However there may be other non-power outage circumstances where I want to remotely access the Admin Console so I will follow through on that. On another different but related note I discovered that one of my two EZIO2x4s had stopped automatically reporting status changes. I did a factory reset and restored from the ISY and all is back to normal. I have had similar troubles with both of these devices in the past but I suspect this instance was related to the power outage. The unit that did not fail was plugged directly into the receptacle of a Belkin single outlet surge protector (from which I had previously removed the signal sucker filter capacitor) and is also within about 3 wire-feet of the main panel with the whole home surge protector on it. The unit that did fail was not plugged directly in but did have an identical Belkin plugged into another outlet about 10 wire-feet away on the same line circuit. Today's projects are to set up a run-on-start-up program to notify me when the ISY reboots and also to connect an AC powered time delay relay into one of the analog ports (all my digital ports are used) on my EZIO8SA to notify me that the Insteon network has been down due to power failure and is now back up. Neil

Thanks everyone for all the replies. LeeG..you are right....the power does fluctuate considerably as it is restored. On a previous instance I happened to be in front of my UPS watching the front panel voltmeter as the power was turned up. It started at about 100 VAC and then over a period of about 10 minutes finally reached 120 VAC. Of course I am sure that there were all sorts of transients (both level and phase) taking place that the voltmeter would not show. In this most recent case our particular outage involved only our house and my new neighbours house....I have a primary voltage (7.2 KV) line coming into our property (rural area) terminating in a transformer which feeds our house and my neighbour. There were many other related outages at the time due to a large storm but we were one of the last to be restored because only our two houses were affected. BrianH.... I agree. The UPS probably shut down during the 33 hours and probably took a short while to turn on after power was restored. However this should have meant that the PLM rebooted first, followed by the ISY coming up once the UPS turned back on. This should have been the proper sequence. Xathros.....Where in the Admin console can you reboot the ISY? I cant seem to find it. Also when I travel I normally just have my iPad. AFAIK there is no Java capability for the iPad. Michel....if my PLM is dying I hope it doesn't go to heaven but somewhere much warmer. This is the PLM that came with my original ISY 99ir Pro about three years ago. Perhaps it is reaching end of life. I will be watching it closely from here on and will also be watching for announced release of the UDI PLM. Teken....I am very interested in a remote web power switch. I have read a couple of the threads on the forum about these devices. I was considering building a pure hardware device using time delay relays to do the same but certainly having a remotely accessible device would be more desirable. Which unit do you have? BTW I think that we are somewhat co-located. I am in YWG territory also....just north of the city. you probably experienced the same storm that caused my problems ( melted all the ice cream in our fridge!) Thanks all. Neil

I had posted a question a few days ago while I was out of town about my remote dashboard showing all devices as simultaneously on and off and also being unable to view any of my programs. This was after a 33 hour power outage at my home. The consensus was that I had PLM troubles of some sort. Now that I am back home from my road trip I was able to check things out. Indeed my ISY was in safe mode and PLM/info under Diagnostics did show that the PLM was not connected . However I noticed that the ISY's RX LED flickered in response to Insteon traffic on my power lines, the PLM's LED was lit up and green, the PLM was not hot to the touch and the ISY log did show all of the expected traffic on my system. So I power cycled the PLM while leaving the ISY still powered up. The PLM/info diagnostics still showed the PLM as not connected. I then power cycled the ISY while leaving the PLM powered up. The PLM/info diagnostics then recognized the PLM and reported it as connected. I also could remotely see the proper status of my devices as well as my programs. So everything was working OK. I currently have my ISY on a UPS with the PLM directly connected to the power line. In my case after 33 hours of no power even the UPS shut down, shutting off the ISY. When the power eventually came on both the ISY and PLM powered up but the ISY must have completed its reboot first, did not see the PLM and consequently went into safe mode. So it appears that it is critical that in the event of a power failure a proper boot sequence must be followed.....ie PLM first, then ISY. Does anyone have any insight on this? I am beginning to question the wisdom of having the ISY on a UPS. I have a whole house surge protector as well as a number of point of use surge protectors which should protect the ISY against surges if it is not behind a UPS. The only other protection that a UPS would give is against brief momentary power drop outs. It doesn't really benefit me to have the ISY up and running in a long term power outage if the rest of the house is without power anyways. Any thoughts on this? I do want to stabilize this system as it does not provide me any value to remotely monitor my house while I am away if the ISY/PLM combo is going to hang up in a power failure. All comments welcome. Neil

Brian...not only do I have a trusted neighbour but he also has an ISY99. Unfortunately he also is out of town and not back until after I get home. I will wait now until I get home. Michel....for once I hope that you are wrong. I have had this happen to me before and it seemed to be solved by rebooting my complete system as per Brian's comment. I can say that I am still able to access my front door security cam through the ISY. I had my ISY on a UPS but the PLM was on unfiltered power. I have both whole home and point of use surge protection but who knows what was happening to the power lines during the storm that did the damage. I am given to understand that a number of tree branches were rubbing on the power line due to high winds causing a number of intermittent short until finally the main breaker on the pole line opened up. I can only imagine what the transients must have been like. A blown PLM may be only the beginning of my problems. Neil

Hi, Not sure if this is the right forum for this question but here goes.... I am currently travelling and after a 33 hour power failure at home my ISY 994 remote dashboard is now showing all devices in both On and Off state. I also cannot see any Programs, instead get an error message saying unable to load programs. I am also not receiving any of my usual email notifications. Any suggestions as to what I could do remotely to fix this? Thanks Neil

LeeG and ELA, Well, I am flummoxed. I did as LeeG suggested and deleted the 2413S/EZIO8SA from my ISY and then added them back into my ISY with auto-detect. And now the ISY does automatically report the change of status of inputs on the EZIO8SA. (LeeG....I did send you a copy of the log anyway.) The only other thing that I can add is that when I first tried to add the new 2413S/EZIO8SA yesterday to my ISY using the auto-detect capability, the ISY reported the 2413S as an "unsupported device" and did not recognize that an EZIO8SA was connected to it. I then deleted the 2413S from the ISY and added it using the manual identification technique to ensure that the EZIO8SA was identified. After that the ISY recognized the EZIO8SA but did not automatically update input status changes. Today when I added the 2413S I did hold the set button for 10 seconds while plugging in the 2413S, assuming that this would do a factory reset. I did not do that yesterday. Perhaps that is the reason things work OK now. In any case, it seems to work OK. I will monitor things for a while now. Hopefully there will be no more problems. Thanks for your help. Neil

Hi again, Just reporting back on the status of my problem. I just received a new 2413S with Rev 9B firmware (NOT an EZICom PLM), deleted the old EZICom PLM/EZIO8SA in my ISY and added the new 2413S/EZIO8SA to my ISY. The ISY still does not automatically update the status of changed inputs on my EZIO8SA. If I do a manual query the change is recognized. So the problem still exists. Correct me if I am wrong but it looks like I can't use the 2413S PLM Rev 9B and have to use a EZIOCom PLM with Rev 9B. Any comments? Thanks Neil

LeeG, Thanks for your opinion. So it looks like I need to get my existing EZIComm reflashed or replaced with an EZIComm with Rev 9B to solve my problem with my EZIO8SA. And then if I want a dedicated PLM to use with the SHN Utility Suite to just purchase either an EZIComm PLM or a Smarthome 2413S with whatever the current firmware is (assuming that there aren't any unknown bugs waiting to show themselves) Neil