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Insteon Users Beware - Do not use Eco-i-Lite Flashlights

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    Insteon Users Beware - Do not use Eco-i-Lite Flashlights

    OK, I have been having MANY issues with lighting, etc. over the past few weeks and finally had some time to troubleshoot. The main problem was I was having multiple issues so it took a while. The first issue was simply my network card was overheating and causing a spotty connection to my Insteon HUB. I fixed that one but was getting still slow response, sporadic behavior and wasn't able to communicate with all my Insteon devices. I was so frustrated that I very close to throwing in the towel with Insteon or buying a bunch of Filterlincs and dual-band products to see if I could improve my situation. Although I was very confused because I historically had no issues Insteon so I pushed on with my quest to find my Insteon issues.

    At one point during my quest I noticed that one of my Access Points was flashing repeatedly. After unplugging everything in my house it went away. So I plugged everything in floor by floor to figure out what floor it was coming from...the upstairs, great because the flashing access point was in the basement. So after getting a bunch of exercise plugging things in one by one, running downstairs to check if the light was flashing only to run back up to check the next item, I finally nailed down the culprit...the Eco-i-Lite flashlights I bought from Costco (see attached photo).

    I actually love these flashlights. They are LED rechargeable lithium-ion and act as a nightlight when charging and are ready to go in a power failure (the light comes on automatically if the power goes out). However, these things are putting some serious noise into my powerline. Some of my Insteon powerline devices were totally unreachable, others took multiple hops to get the commands across. I had one of these flashlights in the same room as one of my access points and it created so much noise that the light on the AP wasn't even flashing, it just looked like it was off.

    Anyway, I would avoid the Eco-i-Lite power failure flashlights unless you want to put them behind a FilterLinc. I would assume these also cause issues with other powerline based technologies (X10, UPB, etc.).
    Attached Files
    Last edited by heatvent; November 21, 2013, 02:14 PM. Reason: Attached photo :)

    #2
    Glad you found the problem. Noise is a killer.

    if you are worried about another nic card going bad, you might consider slowing down the plugin polling to the hub. I documented the ini setting needed to do this. Check the consolidated documentation and make sure you have the latest plugin version.
    Mark

    HS3 Pro 4.2.19.5
    Hardware: Insteon Serial PLM | AD2USB for Vista Alarm | HAI Omnistat2 | 1-Wire HA7E | RFXrec433 | Dahua Cameras | LiftMaster Internet Gateway | Tuya Smart Plugs
    Plugins: Insteon (mine) | Vista Alarm (mine) | Omnistat 3 | Ultra1Wire3 | RFXCOM | HS MyQ | BLRadar | BLDenon | Tuya | Jon00 Charting | Jon00 Links
    Platform: Windows Server 2022 Standard, i5-12600K/3.7GHz/10 core, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD

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