I experienced a first time ever event in the almost 20 yrs of ISY/Polisy/EISY ownership

All my Insteon lights randomly turned on at 3:00 am this morning. The only program scheduled to run is the usual query to devices at 3:00 am. The query confirmed lights were on in the logs.

I'm on the latest up to date EISY firmware, my PLM is relatively new and line noise has never been an issue.

Anyone else experience this weirdness?

Edit: it wasn’t just lights, it was every EISY PLM device, garage door, lights, etc

Edited 14 hours ago14 hr by mmb
Clarification

43 minutes ago, mmb said:

I experienced a first time ever event in the almost 20 yrs of ISY/Polisy/EISY ownership

All my Insteon lights randomly turned on at 3:00 am this morning. The only program scheduled to run is the usual query to devices at 3:00 am. The query confirmed lights were on in the logs.

I'm on the latest up to date EISY firmware, my PLM is relatively new and line noise has never been an issue.

Anyone else experience this weirdness?

Edit: it wasn’t just lights, it was every EISY PLM device, garage door, lights, etc

Do you have older or newer insteon devices? The all on bug happened with older devices usually with those who have motion sensors. Normally the log doesn't show anything. If you have newer devices where the "all on" code has been removed, this hasn't happened with them so you'll be the first.

I would make sure that an errant program didn't trigger them on.

Once every 20 years isn't so bad 😃

If you haven't modified your programs recently, then it can be just a freak occurrence. There are programming tips you can use to minimize the possibility of this happening, such as avoid issuing any new commands right after sending a scene command.

@lilyoyo @Guy Lavoie Thanks they are older but motion sensors. No program modifications.

Also interesting, the logs shows scene IDs instead of scene names around the time of the event. I checked the logs again later this morning and they're gone.

Hard rebooting everything.

Dying batteries in motion sensors can also be a cause of unexplained events.

1 hour ago, Guy Lavoie said:

Dying batteries in motion sensors can also be a cause of unexplained events.

I gave up on them about 15 yrs ago. Battery devices are too flakey.

Almost 20 yrs - I had a good run.

I never had an all-on event but I did have random individual devices turning on when they shouldn't during the "factory query." I had few/no insteon comms issues and dealt with this problem by disabling the nightly query all. It didn't seem to be doing any good for me.

@mmb , I second the opinion that performing a whole house query may be doing more harm than good. This is particularly true if your overall communication (and scene accuracy) is good - meaning that you don't benefit from the query.

Why you ask? It turns out there are serial communication errors occurring regularly between the ISY and the PLM. Most of the time these are harmless and the ISY simply retries the command and we never know the problem occurred. Rarely, the corruption results in a valid command that the PLM puts on the powerline (think all-on/all-off).

@kclenden was the 1st to document that these errors were occurring and could cause All-on/all-off events. Since that time I have see 1 case of a All-on and 1 instance of the PLM Reset due to corrupted communications.

The communication errors are more frequent during periods of heavy communication - Device restores, Program activity with no delays, and system queries.

I have found a mitigation on the ISY994 using the low level "CD" (configure delay) command through the ISY Shell interface (Telnet). This allows you to reduce the rate of successive commands that the ISY issues to the PLM.

Unfortunately, I don't believe this exists on the EISY. This is why I would recommend eliminating the query-all if you can tolerate it. Another possibility would be to shorten/improve the quality of the serial/usb cable to the EISY. I have not found this to help on the ISY994, but the EISY is a different animal.