Diagnosing my Comm issues again.

[ELA]

jmed999,

How long are the cables from the service to your refrigerator and to your Oven/Micro?

 

One advantage of a device on a dedicated circuit (your Oven) is that their signal sucker effects are usually not as severe since their are no Insteon devices on that circuit being directly affected. Their signal sucker effect must be "reflected back to the service" via their connection cable. All cable wiring represents a "coil or inductance". As the cable gets longer the greater the size of the coil or inductance.

By this I am saying that the longer the cable the better. This cable/coil helps to isolate the capacitor that may be across the line inside the device.

 

As you saw a filterlinc can upset communications if they are already marginal. A filterlinc represents about the same Insteon load as a surge strip with a 0.1uf cap inside.

While it may seem unlikely for communications with 2 hops remaining to go to non-responding by just adding a filterlinc it can happen. The key question is: are retries being used?

 

It is very possible that automatic retries are occuring at the PLM level. On one of the retries you get a 3:2 response. What you do not see is that it required retries to get that response. Now you add an additional load and retries begin to fail completely. Since these retries occur at the PLM level the ISY does not display the fact that they are occurring. The ISY time resolution displayed may not be fine enough for you to tell whether retries occur or not.

 

The signalinc can make some communications better and cause others to get worse by adding/removing it as you have seen. For example say that comms on PhaseA are good and on phase B bad without a hardware coupler. You now add the coupler and some on Phase A get worse while some on Phase B get better. This is because the hardware coupler allows the loading effects of each individual phase to now be combined with the other phase. While Phase A might have been lightly loaded and phase B was more heavily loaded, after addition of the signalinc the loading has changed.

 

When I was having issues several people swore by the hardware coupler. I added it without much added benefit. As LeeG said having "amplified phase coupling" near the service is a good way to go.

I have both but I believe the access points near the service are the best solution.

 

I am sorry to hear that you continue to have issues after all the work you have put in. This is the nature of Insteon. Some get lucky and some suffer miserably.

Please do consider making the diagram I mentioned in another post. Without a good communications reliability monitoring tool you are experiencing the trial and error method frustrations.

 

Being able to take a hard look at the overall install on paper can be very helpful. From all that you have said thus far your best bet may be adding more dual band devices to RF couple signals into areas where the signal strengths are low. Being able to see what devices you currently have and where (in relation to the service cabinet and other devices) is a helpful tool.