Re: Cause of some major X10 problems found

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

"Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>"bruceR" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>news:46e604c6$0$17101$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Things started going haywire at my Houston home last week with lights
>coming
>> on randomly and no control to some areas even with an XTB at the main
>> controller and a Smartlinc plug-in Repeater.  I quckly found the culprit:
>A
>> light weight electeronic cellphone charger from a no-name Chinese factory.
>> The almost identical looking Plantronics charger showed nothing on the
>> Monterey tester but the phone charger spat out a continuous string of what
>> showed up BSC (bad start code) messages. As those familiar with the
>Monterey
>> tester know, the unit will show BSC for anything it doesn't really
>> understand.
>
>I seem to recall postings that indicated a device like a noisy PS could
>never generate a signal randomly capable of triggering an X-10 device but
>your experience seems to indicate that's not so.

The probability that a noise source will create valid X-10 PLC codes (1110
followed by manchester encoded data synchonized to powerline half-cycles)
out of whole cloth is near zero - it ain't gonna happen. However, there are
other explanations for the unwanted ONs & OFFs - see the link I cited in my
response to Bruce.