Re: Water heater eating X-10 signal

["Mr. Land" <graftonfot@xxxxxxxxx>]

On May 1, 3:58 pm, ddl@danlan.*com (Dan Lanciani) wrote:
> In article <1178039845.524301.204...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, grafton...@xxxxxxxxx (Mr. Land) writes:
>
> | I dug out an extra WS467 from my X-10 parts box.  I used a small table
> | lamp for testing its operation, right at the panel.  Using clip leads,
> | I wired: from ground to one prong of the lamp, from the other prong of
> | lamp to the black lead of the WS467, from the blue lead of the WS467
> | to what I will call a "test probe".  I also wired the ESM1 from a
> | ground to the blue lead of the WS467, in an effort to "see" what it
> | was seeing.
> |
> | I set the WS467 to the same housecode as my pole lamp, which is C4.
> | Then I fired up my HomeSeer script to continually send C4 ON, sleep 5
> | seconds, send C4 OFF, sleep 5 seconds, send C4 ON, etc.
> |
> | I first connected the test probe to the load side of the breaker
> | feeding the lighting circuit in question.  Immediately I saw new
> | behavior on the ESM1 display: seemingly on each command, the LED bars
> | indicated four (!) distinct signal amplitude peaks.  That is, 5 bars
> | would light, then drop to 3 or 4, then back up to five, repeating for
> | a total of 4 peaks, then silence (which I assume is the sleep call in
> | the script).
>
> Are you sure the sequence wasn't low then high?  That would be normal
> behavior with a repeater, assuming the ESM1 is registering both the
> original and repeated versions.  So you see C4, C4 repeated, ON, and
> then ON repeated (where repeated is in addition to the second copy
> from the transmitter).  A Leviton test set would show only two because
> it measures only the "ON" after it is selected by its (fixed) address.
>
> | This happened consistently at the breaker connection.  I
> | didn't think to measure at the time but I would say from memory that
> | the total duration for the 4 pulses was around 2 seconds.  It really
> | looked like something was echoing the control signal 3 times, except
> | that the green X-10 indicator never came on, and the WS467 never
> | responded.
>
> I would try the 0.1uF capacitor across the WS467.  It is possible that
> you have a noise source not related to the water heater but the addition
> of the heater circuit changes things enough to make it significant.  Keep
> in mind that the WS467 does not have any AGC so it is the absolute level
> of the noise that matters (even if it is tiny compared to the good signal).
> Another possible experiment would be to use a lamp or appliance module
> rather than the WS467; the former are not as sensitive.
>
>                                 Dan Lanciani
>                                 ddl@danlan.*com

Dan,

Thanks for the suggestions - all excellent.  I'll do some more
testing.

If I no longer post replies you'll know I finally fried myself
sticking wires into my mains panel.