edentel Posted May 17, 2009 Share Posted May 17, 2009 Ok if you don't want to read the whole story, the question at the end is: "Can you somehow have TOO connected an Insteon network? Even though a I have 2 200 amp panels in the basement it appears that with my 60 some odd devices the addition of a pair of APs breaks my network." Now the story.... Ok so I've been pulling my hair out since the recent switch to the PLM with ISY. I had ICONs that had been failing and started swapping them out with Smarthome. I figured now or never to switch over to the PLM/ISY combo. After I got all the switches replaced I started trying to program them. With a little testing I found that my signal quality in the stairwells and the master bedroom of my home had gone to poor at best. I defaulted everything with factory resets and reprogrammed my 5-way switches in the stairwells. In the quest to solve it I even added an extra pair of APs. It seems like switch to switch communication was ok, maybe 1 out of 20 times the switch wouldn't work. When it came to ISY nothing in that area was being seen well. I ordered and installed another pair of AP's . One piggybacked to the PLM and three spread around the house. Same story... I yanked out the ISY and went back to Homeseer's PLM plugin. After a few days I looked at the stats and was seeing 50% or worse communication failure in those areas. I double checked with Powerhome and saw the same. After a few days I decided to start from scratch. That brings us to today. I yanked out all 4 APs and reset everything. I wanted to see just how bad communications were and left the APs out all together. Well guess what... everything worked perfectly. I let Powerhome crawl the whole network a few times and saw 100% on all 60 some devices. Hey...wait...what!??!?!? No APs and communication is perfect!?!?!? So I plug the ISY back in and learn a few devices. Everything is still working perfect and fast. Weeeeell ok... time to try the thermostat. I plug in a pair of APs back in to where they were and pair them. Yup they see each other and are on different phases. The thermostat comes up fine. GREAT! Everything works.... wait... what?!?!? Looking at the browser for ISY I see devices showing as not found. Say what?!?!? I try turning some stuff on from ISY and the same devices fail again. I toggle them locally and no report to ISY. I remove one AP and I see the same.... I pull the second AP and everything works fine. So I go to a corner of the house and plug in a single AP to bring the thermostat back up. As of now that is how I'm running and everything is fine. Sooooo after that long story the question, can you somehow have TOO connected an Insteon network? Even though a I have 2 200 amp panels in the basement it appears that with my 60 some odd devices the addition of a pair of APs breaks my network. I'm going to go grab a bottle of rum... this hurts my head! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeB Posted May 17, 2009 Share Posted May 17, 2009 Is it possible you simply have a bad AP corrupting your network? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edentel Posted May 17, 2009 Author Share Posted May 17, 2009 I'm going to test every permutation but for tonight I'm thinking no.... 1) The problem was around when I only had a pair of Rev 1.2 APs 2) I added a pair of Rev 1.6 APs - still had problem 3) Tonight during testing I only used the Rev 1.6 APs Tomorrow night I'll play around with trying pair of 1.2, pair of 1.6, 1.2 with 1.6 just to hopefully eliminate that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IndyMike Posted May 18, 2009 Share Posted May 18, 2009 Ok if you don't want to read the whole story, the question at the end is: "Can you somehow have TOO connected an Insteon network? Even though a I have 2 200 amp panels in the basement it appears that with my 60 some odd devices the addition of a pair of APs breaks my network." 400 amps combined is a lot of service. Can you tell us if you have a single meter head or two meters? Two meters would imply separate transformer feeds and possibly additional complications with phasing. Weeeeell ok... time to try the thermostat. I plug in a pair of APs back in to where they were and pair them. Yup they see each other and are on different phases. The thermostat comes up fine. GREAT! Everything works.... wait... what?!?!? Looking at the browser for ISY I see devices showing as not found. Say what?!?!? I try turning some stuff on from ISY and the same devices fail again. I toggle them locally and no report to ISY. I remove one AP and I see the same.... I pull the second AP and everything works fine. So I go to a corner of the house and plug in a single AP to bring the thermostat back up. As of now that is how I'm running and everything is fine. While I have seen situations where a pair of AP's actually degrade performance, I've never seen a single AP do that. If you have a single AP that is causing problems (installed alone), then I would agree with MikeB that you have a problem device. Tomorrow night I'll play around with trying pair of 1.2, pair of 1.6, 1.2 with 1.6 just to hopefully eliminate that. It has been reported that V1.0 AP's don't play well with later rev's (I can't verify this). This raises the possibility that mixing 1.2 and 1.6 could be a problem. As I said above, I've seen situations where AP's can cause problems under "Test Conditions". These were special test setups where I was performing stress testing on the protocol. I haven't encountered problems in real implementation. Very interested in what you find, IM Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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