INSTEON Communication Woes...

Posted on
Thu Dec 24, 2020 6:02 pm
bobm91001 offline
Posts: 15
Joined: Jun 06, 2012

INSTEON Communication Woes...

I've been fighting communications issues to several of my devices, for the purpose of this post I'll concentrate on two of them.

First a bit about my set up. I've been using Indigo for many years, mostly with INSTEON devices. I currently have, I think, 44 INSTEON devices of various types I also have an X10 bridge between the two phases in the house. Indigo is running on a Mac mini with a PowerLink 2448A7. Most device communications to/from Indigo a pretty reliable. However there are a few that are much less so.

The two I'll concentrate on are a KeypadLinc (brand new since I thought the old one might have been the issue) and an I/O Linc for the garage door.

First, the KeypadLinc (Firmware 45(. It is in a gang of three, all share the same common, ground and power connections. I took me well over an hour with many attempts to sync links after replacing the old with the new. The other two in the gang are SwitchLinc relays (Firmware 41 and 43); these seem to respond just fine. The KeypadLinc fails on roughly 50% of status requests. Most of my issues seem to be with KeypadLincs.

Second is the Garage Door I/O Linc (Firmware 41). It also fails on approximately 50% of the status requests. As an experiment I plugged an On/Off Module (Firmware 48) directly into the I/O Linc. it is pretty much 100% reliable.

Due to these issues getting the garage door to be reliable has been nearly impossible.

FWIW, both of these are on the same circuit (I know since I couldn't open the garage door while I changed out the KeypadLinc! :? )

Thanks for any ideas on how to deal with this.

Posted on
Sat Dec 26, 2020 3:18 pm
matt (support) offline
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Re: INSTEON Communication Woes...

Try temporarily plugging the I/O-Linc into the same power strip / outlet as the PowerLinc. Do you still get a 50% failure on status requests with it there? If so, then I think it might be a marginal unit. If not, then it sounds like a signal problem (power line or RF) is the culprit. Your PowerLinc might also be marginal, but I would expect more widespread problems if that were the case.

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Posted on
Sun Dec 27, 2020 1:57 pm
bobm91001 offline
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Joined: Jun 06, 2012

Re: INSTEON Communication Woes...

Thanks for the suggestions Matt, but...

First, I guess I misled you calling it a PowerLinc, it’s the RF adapter; fooey, not sure why I did that! So I can’t plug the I/o Linc in the same power strip. :D I had USB powerlincs before, but had lots of issues with them failing, so switched to RF a few years ago.

I believe the I/o linc is not dual band, so I plugged a dual band on/off module (2635) directly into it. The 2635 seems to be 100% reliable, the I/o linc not so much.

I also have KeypadLincs with similar issues, even one that shares a box and connections with SwitchLincs, the SwitchLinc are OK, the KeypadLinc again, not so much.

Bob

Posted on
Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:13 am
jay (support) offline
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Re: INSTEON Communication Woes...

Unfortunately, Matt's post doesn't really change except that one diagnostic isn't possible. You can try factory resets on the devices that aren't working reliably to see if they are just in some bad state. If it's several though then it's most likely some kind of signal issue, most likely on the garage circuit. Try unplugging everything else in the garage and see if things get any better. Maybe something in there is causing noise. Check out the signal troubleshooting guide for more ideas.

Jay (Indigo Support)
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Posted on
Mon Dec 28, 2020 7:33 pm
bobm91001 offline
Posts: 15
Joined: Jun 06, 2012

Re: INSTEON Communication Woes...

Thanks Jay...

So,

A) I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that page before but completely forgot about it.

B) I think I’m getting dumber by the day. We’ve had problems with brown outs for many years, at one point it was causing our garage door to malfunction and the only way to getting working was to unplug it. Needles to say this was hard to do when it malfunctioned with the door down (we have no other entry to the garage). So during this time I plugged the garage door into an on/off module so we could reset it remotely. A year or so ago the power company came through and replaced poles and upgraded our grid. No more brown outs! Shortly after this the garage door opener went completely belly up. The main control board was replaced and the installer was surprised that it lasted as long as it did since it was a bad design. Recently I’ve had time to clean out the garage so we can now park a car in there. Of course now we rely on the garage door working more reliably than we did a few months ago. So, the issues we’ve had were probably always there, but we just dealt with it. Anyway, at some point during all of this I added an old surge protector into the mix in order to protect the garage door opener from those old electrical service issues we were having. Well, that’s right, I think that was a big offender in my communication issues. While it hasn’t completely solved the problem, it is much better.

The I/o linc is much improved (80-90% reliable) and the KeypadLinc is slightly improved. To continue troubleshooting I’ve checked all devices on that circuit, I’ve only found lights, mostly various forms of LED all controlled by various on/off SwitchLincs many arranged as 3-ways with no load. Oh, that reminds me, the troublesome keypad has no load. To remove the LEDs from the equation, I pulled the set button to “hard off” on all of the SwitchLinc’s. This did not seem to help the keypad issues. However, while restoring all the SwitchLinc’s, one of them failed and would not turn back on. If I push the set button in, the indicator led just flashes. I think I have a spare which I’ll try tomorrow.

Anyway, sorry for the long story but maybe it will help someone else in the future or spur an idea that might help me some more. I may need to do a whole house survey, circuit by circuit to see if I can find another signal sucker...

Bob

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