Re: Cause of some major X10 problems found

["bruceR" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dave Houston wrote:
> "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

I think the switches are based on the WS467 although they do have the soft
start feature (ramp up/down). They are probably 10 years old by now. I agree
that these random on events are not caused by generated codes because my JDS
TimeCommander+ log would have shown event.  The noise was definitely the
culprit though as the problem disappeared with filter installation.