Re: Water heater eating X-10 signal

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

I've been able to do a little more testing, and I'm beginning to
believe that my "stable" system wasn't so stable after all; that it
was really just barely working, and the addition of the water heater
circuit was simply a straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

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).  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.

This breaker is installed about halfway down the height of the panel.
At the bottom of the panel, there is an unused, exposed stake tab on
that same phase.  I moved my test probe to that tab.  I saw the same
repeating 4-peak pulses, except now, on every 3rd pulse, the ESM1's
X-10 indicator came on.  The WS467 began to intermittently respond to
the commands (some it missed, some it responded to, about 50/50).  I
then flipped off the water heater's breaker.  Nothing changed on the
ESM1, but the WS467 "success rate" went up: most of the time it
responded, but it still missed a command here and there.)

Unfortunately I ran out of time at this point, but the next test I
wanted to try was to leave the ESM1 connected, and switch out the
WS467, to see if its addition was causing this new, "4-peak" behavior.

I'll post my results (I feel I owe you guys at this point %^)

Thanks.