Weird 3am stuff with a few devices

[JMoots]

Ok, this is going to sound goofy. Let me explain the situation and I’m hoping one of you experts has an idea what’s going on. 
 

i have a house full of Insteon stuff. Every light switch. Some outlets. Fan controllers. Switch pads. It all goes to a serial PLM and to an ISY994i. It all works GREAT! I’ve had it running for a couple years. It talk to Home Assistant and Home Assistant ultimately delivers it to HomeKit where I control things. 
 

One weird thing I’ve always noticed is one switch in my master bedroom has a buzz in it whenever a switch or anything on the Insteon network gets used. I assume there’s something mismanufactured in this switch that’s letting me hear the communications. It’s super quiet, but I can hear it. In the middle of the night it has a fit. I assume that’s some timed process that checks and adjusts the state of all devices. It lasts a minute or so, usually doesn’t wake me up, but it’s regular. I’ve always ignored it. 
 

Recently, because I’m aging, i get up a bunch in the middle of the night. Sometimes my master bedroom fan is off. As I start digging through logs, it gets shut off sometimes at 3am. Then recently, the living room fan did the same thing. Then recently I had a light in the mechanical room turn itself on… at 3am. Looking through logs, it’s always 3am. Sometimes something gets turned on, sometimes off. 
 

i have no programs configured to do anything like that. Anyone have any guesses as to what might be going on? Anyone know what system is doing that 3am check/reset of the Insteon stuff? I assume it might be the ISY but I don’t see that in the configuration. I’m thinking maybe the ISY is going through and forcing all Insteon devices to the state it thinks they should be and that in some circumstances it’s wrong about a fan, or a light. With HomeKit going through Home Assistant to get to the ISY, i could image a state could get miscommunicated here or there. Just trying to track it down. 

Edited October 5, 2022 by JMoots

[hart2hart]

There is usually a query all device program that runs at 3:00 am by default.

[MrBill]

As @hart2hart mentions there is a factory program that runs at 3:00am that does a system query.  The bigger question tho is why does the query program cause things to happen that shouldn't.  

The first experiment that I would try is to disable the switch that makes the noise you can hear,  it may be creating noise on the electrical line also. Most switches can be disabled by pulling the set button at the bottom of the paddle out.

If you want to test this during the daytime, find the program in your program tree, most likely named "Query All".  The IF statement will be "Time is 3:00am" and the THEN will be "Set ISY Query".  You can manually make the query occur by Right Clicking the program name and choosing "Run Then" from the context menu.

So try disabling the switch, and then manually running the Query All, and let us know what happens.

[JMoots]

Great info guys! Thanks! I will try it and report back. 

[JMoots]

Manually running the Query all doesn’t do anything weird. But for the past three nights, at about 3:01, the furnace room light comes on. It’s in the log. Looks like a normal entry on the log, I just can’t tell what it telling it to turn on. I reset the Insteon Switch and added it back today. We’ll see what happens tonight. lucky for me, I’m getting old, so I get up at 2 and 3 and 4 … 

Edited October 7, 2022 by JMoots

[kclenden]

3 hours ago, JMoots said:

I just can’t tell what it telling it to turn on.

How old is the switch?  Older switches allowed an X-10 address to be assigned to a device so that it could be controlled by X-10 commands.  I had a switch acting weird and eventually traced it to the fact that an X-10 address had been assigned at some point (though not by me).

3 hours ago, JMoots said:

I reset the Insteon Switch

What kind of reset?  If it was a factory reset at the switch that would wipe out any assigned X-10 addresses as well as any erroneous Insteon links which might solve your problem.  If it was simply removing the switch from the ISY and then adding it back, you could still have erroneous links or X-10 addresses.

Edited October 7, 2022 by kclenden

[JMoots]

11 hours ago, kclenden said:

How old is the switch?  Older switches allowed an X-10 address to be assigned to a device so that it could be controlled by X-10 commands.  I had a switch acting weird and eventually traced it to the fact that an X-10 address had been assigned at some point (though not by me).

What kind of reset?  If it was a factory reset at the switch that would wipe out any assigned X-10 addresses as well as any erroneous Insteon links which might solve your problem.  If it was simply removing the switch from the ISY and then adding it back, you could still have erroneous links or X-10 addresses.

I'm not sure how to tell how old it is. It's a couple years old going by my purchase. It just started doing this recently though and to the best of my knowledge, I hadn't made any changes to it. 

I did a full Insteon factory reset. I thought the same as you, any weird links would get cleared. I may have even bought this switch used, so I might not be 100% sure of how it's been programmed. I would have thought I'd have done a full reset on a used switch, but I'm also lazy. If it worked, I might not have

After the full reset, no weirdness last night! 

I have nothing scheduled to turn on at 3am, but I'm not sure what that query all actually does. It seems convenient that this switch was coming on within a minute of 3am routinely. So maybe it just had some garbage in it that the Query All was making fire off. We'll see, I guess! 

I appreciate the minds to bounce things off of here. Thanks guys!

[Geddy]

31 minutes ago, JMoots said:

I'm not sure what that query all actually does. It seems convenient that this switch was coming on within a minute of 3am routinely. So maybe it just had some garbage in it that the Query All was making fire off. We'll see, I guess! 

It basically just checks the status of all devices and reports that to the ISY.

From the ISY Cookbook:

Quote

23.3.8   Query INSTEON Engine 
If a device is not behaving as expected (for example, On Level or Ramp Rate is not working
properly) the ISY may not have proper information about the device’s capabilities.  To
refresh this information simply right-click the Device in the node list and choose Query
INSTEON Engine.  This will update the ISY’s stored information and may correct the issue
you are having.   

Not specific to the 3am default program that was on the ISY994. It's not in the ISY on Polisy by default, but many are adding it for personal reasons. 

My suggestion would be to disable the program as well. Certainly if it still happens. With the program disabled it isn't going to mess up anything and you would know then if something else was indeed triggering the device(s) at 3am (or 3 minutes past). 

Also check your program summary tab to see if any random programs ran around that time. You can click on "Last Run Time" or "Last Finish Time" to sort by when the programs run.

[hart2hart]

The issues from your original post are when the state of the switch/device is reported at 3;00 am s as no it’s different than what the ISY had thus causing some program or potentially a scene to be executed. The typical issue is bad communications and status change has been missed.

Look for any program or scene that the device coming on in the night and see what triggers it. Then check those device’s actual status against what the ISY / plm sees to determine if they are out of sync.

[JMoots]

Just an update… 

 

after factory resetting the mechanical room switch it quit misbehaving. But then my bedroom fan started shutting off at 3am ish again.

I’ve disabled the Query All routine from happening at 3am and I’ve had zero bad behavior since. 

Edited October 11, 2022 by JMoots

[Techman]

It sounds like you have a defective device that when queried creates noise on the powerline.

You might want to try independently querying each of your devices to see if you can narrow down the culprit. 

[kzboray]

@JMoots I agree with @Techman you probably have a device that is creating a lot of electrical noise. I liked his idea of the individual device query and wanted to also point out the power of circuit breakers. You can cut power to individual circuits to facilitate narrowing in on the offending device.

This is a labor intensive process and there are really no short cuts. You have to go device by device. It could still be something other than an Insteon device, but I'd check the Insteon stuff first as @Techman suggested. Anything that comes on around 3am is suspect.

I once had a client with a pool pump that looked fine, smelled fine and ran just fine, but it was going bad and throwing enough noise into the system that when it started up around 5am each day it would ruin communications on the power line for an hour.

[apostolakisl]

So I have not read all the posts here so I might be repeating.  I read the first few.

What can happen with the query all is the following:  If a program is set to run on the status of a device, and that device has an incorrect status in ISY because of a previously missed communication, then the query all will update that device's status to the correct status and in so doing, trigger any programs that included the device status in the "if" clause.  

So this issue will not happen every time there is a 3am query all.  It only happens when the pre-query-all status is incorrect and the query updates it to the correct status.

You should be able find the program that is being triggered by looking at your program summary page and finding programs that ran at ~3am.

A potential way to avoid this issue is to use device "control" rather than "status" if possible.  "control" will not trigger on a status change.  Also, figuring out why the device status is wrong (or in other words why you have a com problem).  

[mwester]

On 10/11/2022 at 12:54 PM, JMoots said:

after factory resetting the mechanical room switch it quit misbehaving. But then my bedroom fan started shutting off at 3am ish again.

I’ve disabled the Query All routine from happening at 3am and I’ve had zero bad behavior since. 

This is a good short-term fix.  However, you need to find the root cause and fix that.  By analogy:

 

You are in charge of a large interstate highway bridge.  At 3AM every morning, portions of the bridge have been falling out of the superstructure into the Mississippi river beneath -- coincidentally, at 3AM every morning, a convoy of heavy trucks from a local manufacturing company crosses that bridge.

Of course you'll immediately stop that convoy from crossing the unsafe bridge and causing more damage.

But obviously, just because nuts, bolts, braces, and beams have stopped falling off the bridge when you stopped that 3AM convoy doesn't mean that the bridge is safe -- it's just a matter of time until some group of traffic on that bridge (or your Insteon network) arrives that has a similar load and/or vibration, and once again more of your bridge splashes into the river.

 

That 3AM query is tough, and represents the most sustained high-load activity your Insteon network is likely to experience, but all that traffic is completely within spec -- and whatever specific signal or sequence is causing your trouble can also appear in other traffic throughout the day.  It's just a matter of time until it does, and things go wonky again.

 

So, keep hunting.

[JMoots]

Really good responses and advice here, team! Thank you. I’ll go after it. 

[carealtor]

I deleted (maybe naively) that program years ago on my system.  Never missed it.  Just sayin'.

[Venicenerd]

On 10/5/2022 at 3:45 AM, JMoots said:

i have a house full of Insteon stuff. Every light switch. Some outlets. Fan controllers. Switch pads. It all goes to a serial PLM and to an ISY994i. It all works GREAT! I’ve had it running for a couple years. It talk to Home Assistant and Home Assistant ultimately delivers it to HomeKit where I control things. 

I hope you have been able to solve your issue.

**HIJACK WARNING - IGNORE IF YOU'RE STILL HAVING ISSUES**

Your setup looks exactly like mine so I was wondering if you have had any issues creating your scenes, containing Insteon devices, in Home Assistant itself? When I place more than 3-4 Insteon devices into a Home Assistant scene not all of the Insteon devices respond. I assume the Insteon Network may get overwhelmed?

However, when I create an Insteon Scene on the ISY itself and control the entire scene through a Home Assistant Switch the issue becomes that HA will still show the scene/switch as "on" even if not all devices of that scene are turned on. This will stop my automations inside HA from working correctly since they will not turn the scene on again since they believe it's still on. 

So if I tell Siri "Set the scene arriving home" it will turn on all of the lights and the HA switch for the scene turns on. But then if I turn off just one of the lights in that scene the HA switch will remain as "on". So now when I tell Siri "Set the scene arriving home" it won't turn that light back on since the entire scene still shows as activated in HA.

Wondering how you are dealing with this?

Edited October 18, 2022 by Venicenerd

[Geddy]

@Venicenerd Thanks for the hijack notice...I'm going to lock this since OP seems to have handled issue. If you'd like to ask your question in the Home Assistant area perhaps you'd get more assistance.

https://forum.universal-devices.com/forum/128-home-assistant/