insteon keypadlinc is acting up

[bdee1]

i have a keypadlinc in my living room in 8 button format. it has just generally been acting up lately. not sure why but many time i will have to press a button 2 or 3 times before it actually works. it has been working reliably for a few years and suddenly it has decided to act up.

for instance one button on it will turn off my home theater via an event in homeseer. until a month or so ago, i had NEVER had it fail but now about 30% of the time it just wont catch. so i have to do it 3 or 4 times.

interestingly, i also have a little web page set up on my iphone that just allows me to click a button and trigger an event. that has always worked instantly. but now sometimes there is delay of several seconds...

i have tried rebooting my homeseer system and it didnt seem to help. any ideas how i can start troubleshooting this?

[sckoman]

Beeddee .... I would bet you have a recent powerline noise problem. The Insteon plugin has a utility function that tells you how many (%) of the Insteon transactions are sucessful. Go look there ... if its less than 75% you have a noise issue of some kind. There are all sorts of things that can cause that. Think back to when the problem first started and think about what changed around your house; what was added, changed, etc etc

[bdee1]

hey sorry i got sidetracked with work and am just getting back to this... before i saw your post i noticed that there were updates available both for homeseer and the insteon PLC plugin so i installed them both. that didnt seem to help.

i am not sure where i can find that reliability info in homeseer though. i know what you are talking about and i have seen it before but i cant seem to find it now.

and interestingly this morning my keypadlinc just stopped working alltogether and all the buttons are constantly flashing very rapidly. i tried pulling out the tab at the bottom to reset it but when i pressed it back in the buttons just continued to flash.

is the keypad possibly defective?? what could the rapid flashing mean?

[sckoman]

More

A failure is always possible .... I just had an Icon branded Insteon appliance module go bad suddenly and for no good reason. It is dead as a doornail. And of course its out of warranty. I hope this is not a trend.

To see the communications reliability goto Setup>Interfaces, click on Insteon Configuration then Manage Devices. The comm reliability data will be there on the right side of each device.

[bdee1]

i just looked at the reliability info and found that for the keypadlinc in question it says:
Comm Reliability %: 95% (1 failed out of 21 cmds)

yet its far more than 5% of the time that i press the button and it doesnt trigger the event.

I cant think of anything that would have really introduced any noise that i have plugged in recently. because the problem is so random, it will be hard to troubleshoot by just unplugging stuff throughout the house - is there some better way to test than unplugging something and then going and pressing the keypadlinc button?

[Mr Spock]

Have you added any modern electronic devices? TVs, computers, compact florescent lamps? Anything with a switching power supply. If so, line filters or signal boosters may be necessary.

Compact florescent lamps are notorious broadband noise generators as they age. Once they start to flicker they will jam your AC power line.

[bdee1]

well i suppose i added something and didn't realize it but i really have thought hard about it and i cant think of anything new that i have plugged in. i do have some compact fluorescent bulbs in lamps and fixtures throughout the house but i put those in like a year ago and none of them seem to be flickering or anything.

[Mr Spock]

My experience with compact florescent lamps has been very mixed. Some work ok through their entire lifetime. But most of the one's I've used have been awful noise generators. I had to put filters on all of them!

For the models that caused me trouble, the first half of their life was ok. But as they aged they started to generate noise. Especially in the first hour of turn on and turn off. I never could understand how these damn things could cause noise on the line when initially turned off; it makes no sense. But I could easily confirm it by removing the lamp and watching the background noise level drop to zero. I was using an oscilloscope to do this.

As they aged further the situation would get worse. Random things in my house would turn on or off. I once came home to see my pool had been filling with water for 5 hours. AC line filters almost eliminated the problem for me. Now it's only a problem when it gets to the flickering stage of death.

I have no idea if this is your problem, just sharing my experiences.

Good luck.

[sckoman]

So as not to confuse this even more, but something to think about ...

1] Insteon uses BOTH powerline and RF as transmission media. However, the PLC and the PLM(?) use powerline only. This infers that the communication bottleneck - if it is in fact powerline noise - is *probably* near the PLC/PLM. However, as a conducted broadband noise source, it could really be anywhere.

2] If you are in a condo, apartment or any buliding where there is shared power, someone else's noise generator problem could very well be your problem.

I am not sure, but I believe even the ISY is subject to this constraint becuase it uses the Insteon PLM. I believe there is a ZWave ISY available (?) I have all Insteon.