Insteon Device creates issues with the controller?

[alphatech]

Hi Mark, I have been free of issues for a long time, I wish I could say the same with Z-Wave :-) Not sure 100% if that was the case but the PLM controller was experiencing issues starting couple of days ago. It would reset itself because it was losing connection, I guess. I have found out that it may have been due to a Insteon device (Light Switch) that stopped functioning. When I replace the light switch, it was working again. Could the issue be that light switch and if so, there is anything that we can easily do to troubleshoot? I spent two days trying to figure it out.

Thanks

[mnsandler]

if your failing device was flooding the insteon network;. this will cause problems for the plm; you might see a lot of NAKs in the detailed log. you might be able to run the comm test from the plugin to see how devices respond. But the plm doesn't report noise, or bad messages just NAKs.

i had a failing switch that was flooding the RF spectrum and caused comm issues with other RF only devices. the only way i was able to figure this out was to buy an 900 mhz spectrum analyzer. this took me months. I haven't found any insteon tools for analyzing insteon RF or powerline issues.

[Burrington]

I use the old Monterey Instruments Powerline Signal Analyzer. It was designed for X10, but Insteon uses the same powerline signal, so it works just fine for troubleshooting Insteon signals. It shows the Insteon signal strength and powerline noise. That's what you need to find runaway devices, noise caused by other devices, and signal killing devices. It can't decode the Insteon protocol, but the Insteon plugin does that just fine so it doesn't matter. They were about $300 new. They but have been discontinued, but there are still some available out there if you do a search.

https://guide.alibaba.com/shop/x10-p..._59713766.html

[joegr]

Seems like that wouldn't help with the RF side. Most Insteon devices are dual-band (Powerline and RF) now.

[Burrington]

I have not suffered an RF side failure so have no experience with that. However, when an Insteon dual-band device sees a signal from another device, it repeats it on both the RF and Powerline paths (that's the very strength of Insteon). Therefore, I believe that if a faulty device is spewing traffic on the RF path, it would also show up as additional traffic on the powerline side and vice versa.

The meter does not understand the Insteon protocol, but it still shows an unknown character for each Insteon character. So if a device is spewing traffic on the powerline side, it shows up as a continuous stream of characters, rather than the expected intermittent bursts.

If the RF problem is caused by a non-Insteon device, you would need the RF analyzer as Mark described above.

[joegr]

Who knows, but from what I have seen, they won't repeat nonsense RF, but it can keep the devices receiving it so busy that they don't correctly respond to the power line. That said, the power line analyzer is still very useful much of the time, I'm sure.

[Burrington]

Agreed.