Re: Cause of some major X10 problems found

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

"bruceR" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>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.

Any time it sees a 1110 sequence that is not followed by a valid X-10 code
it calls it a BSC. You're likely to see that scenario with any mostly
continuous noise source as well as with collisions between valid codes.

> The soultion was to simply plug the charger into an X10 Filter.

Are there any WS467 switches in use? Steven Bloom documented how they are
directly vulnerable to noise spikes. I've seen more or less the same (rather
than randon ONs, OFFs  following a manual switching off of an older
fluorescent) with the LM14A.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.home.automation/msg/62d41d8a36fef5ea?oe=UTF-8&output=gplain