UPB network is dead--really dead

[Pete]

So what caused all this noise you might ask? This is the part that kind of irritates me. It was my damn GFI. One simple reset of the GFI removed the noise. But in order to find this I had installed UPStart on a laptop, plugged the PIM into that and roamed the house zeroing in on the noise. It was an effective way to find it; however, I put it off for a few days because I had too many other commitments.

Thank-you jlrichar!

Yup; SA/HAI/PCS support of their UPB stuff has always been top notch over the years.

Good to know what happened. Here I have added more outdoor outlets and every one has a GFI. Every bathroom has multiple GFIs and every outlet in the kitchen has GFI's. This is totally different than the new construction done in FL where the electrician used one GFI for many outlets in numerous locations. I don't know if it was a cost savings measure but it sure has been a PITA to deal. The electrician in FL crossed over rooms using GFI circuits.

Both houses were built around the same time.

One home uses all conduit with metal boxes and the other uses Romex with plastic boxes. The house in Florida also has fire breaks in the walls which I have seen here in my oldest home that originally was built in the 1950's. This though made it difficult to add a couple of circuits with the Romex stuff. Here in the midwest I have utilized the existing runs of conduit to add more circuits which made it easy as I did run the circuits to the fuse panel. There are no firebreaks here in any of the walls.

That said I never knew that a GFI could cause noise on the UPB stuff.

Thank-you for providing the information!

[spud]

just moved the posts related to jlrichar problem to a new thread, to keep the Beta testing thread for problems with the plugin.

sorry for the noob question but what's a GFI?

[Pete]

Its like a saftey outlet which will trip in case of an electrical problem.

Its pretty standard here today in new construction to have them everywhere. Thinking it is just part of the whole building code stuff for new homes.

IE: here wife trips the one in "her" bathroom connecting her dryer and curling iron at the same time to the GFCI outlet.

Its really called a GFCI (Ground Fault circuit interupter).

Best explained by the Wiki here:

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFCI

[jlrichar]

Its like a saftey outlet which will trip in case of an electrical problem.

Its pretty standard here today in new construction to have them everywhere. Thinking it is just part of the whole building code stuff for new homes.

IE: here wife trips the one in "her" bathroom connecting her dryer and curling iron at the same time to the GFCI outlet.

Its really called a GFCI (Ground Fault circuit interupter).

Best explained by the Wiki here:

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFCI

The example is a good one. I have one main GFI circuit in my house, it connects all the outlets inside bathrooms with all of the original outlets outside. I suspect that one of the outside outlets is the culprit and had a small short in the form of a spider or something. I'm not sure why the noise went so high though, and also baffled why only resetting the GFI worked.

Spud, any chance you could add a noise trigger to the plugin? So I could get a notification that UPB noise is high for example. It would be useful in general to get a notification is someone plugs a noise generator in too.

[Pete]

You got me looking today and tested using Upstart.

Running the Network Communications Test I see Signal@PIM at around 75 and up. A bunch of them are over 100. Signal@Dev are around 20-80 and I do see a bit of noise; nothing over 5 though.

A health check option would be nice if it included signal at PIM, DEV and Noise. Not sure though how easy that would be to do.

[cheeryfool]

UPB network is dead--really dead

Here my electric debaucle a few years back was related to putting 220VAC on the 120VAC lines. I do have a commercial surge protector in place and that has worked with lighting strikes. In this case the Insteon switches all failed (actually burned up), while checking all of the wiring and rest of switches

Not entirely off topic...

I just had a power debacle of my own. Was away and wife calls me saying lights are going crazy and outlets, switches are smoking. After a quick direction to kill the master power switch on the board and to call 911, it turns out that we have an 'open neutral' on the incoming supply from the PoCo. From what I now understand that is one of the causes for one phase to receive 220VAC instead of the normal 110.

Needless to say, multiple items didn't make it through this. Various expensive high wattage ZWave dimmers, less expensive plug-in modules, fancy Pio Receiver etc etc. And yes, I had 2 surge protectors for the receiver, neither of which was damaged and neither prevented this event.

Currently we have a "Green Machine" transformer in place which appears to ground from the meter if we should have a recurrence and are waiting for PoCo to come and resolve in a more permanent manner.

From a little research it would appear that surge protectors are just not fast enough to catch an event like this. Not sure if your's was a similar event Pete?

[Pete]

Yes it was.

What happened too was about 1/2 of all of the breakers tripped in the house concurrent with a very loud buzzing (electrical sound) and my outside AC unit in flames, sparking and melting the copper freon pipe.

The inside double 40 AMP breaker for the AC did trip too.

I don't know if the commercial surge protector did anything. That said though I didn't lose any of the LCD TV's or appliances. Just the switches. I tested the UPB switches and they were fine; but I still replaced most of them anyways.

I had another electric debaucle happen right before winter last year (actually though did snow). I lost one phase of electric one early Sunday morning. Electric company did rewire me to the single phase and the electric feed sat like this for about 3 weeks or so before it was fixed.

Personally I am not sure if a surge protector is made to take care of a 220VAC surge; rather I think its more for lightning and higher voltages. A power conditioner might work; but they are not really a residential thing; more of a commercial box. (I've set this up once for a Ford satellite office - generator, UPS/power conditioner - lots of space utilized for a small office). It was really only for the computers; not the people there; if that makes any sense?

[cheeryfool]

Currently we have a "Green Machine" transformer in place which appears to ground from the meter if we should have a recurrence and are waiting for PoCo to come and resolve in a more permanent manner.

So, we chased the PoCo a couple of times, but they hadn't been out to fix the underlying problem. We were away last week and came home to more dysfunctional devices, despite still having the "Green Machine" inline since March.

This time we lost a FiOS DVR, 2 more z-Wave dimmers, z-wave outdoor switch and most scarily a z-wave appliance switch which was controlling a dehumidifier. I found the plug melted into the switch, melted into the splitter, melted in to the outlet cover with scorch marks 8" up the stud!!

Needless to say, we were extremely lucky not to have lost the whole house. PoCo arrived within an hour and spent all day digging two doors down the street. They now say the problem was bigger than they originally thought which explains why the Green Machine didn't protect us! Allegedly now all fixed.

Now time to put a claim in to PoCo