X10 Community Forum
🔌General Home Automation => Automating Your House => Troubleshooting Automation Problems => Topic started by: BarryJ on February 27, 2007, 10:41:30 AM
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I have a WS13A in the same electrical box as a standard wall switch. The WS13A is set to A10 and controls a light on the other side of the wall (a porch light). The standard wall switch controls the light in the entryway. If I disconnect the hot (line) lead from the WS13A going to the wall switch - it responds to X10 signals and works just fine. If I reconnect the hot (line) going to the wall switch, so it will have power - the WS13A stops responding to the X10 signals. What am I doing wrong?
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I did some searching and found that the hot lead in the box also feeds several outlets in another room, in addition to the entry light. I'm going to have to troubleshoot a little more.
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I'm not sure what this has to do with it, but... I found a surge protected power strip plugged into an outlet that gets it's power from the Hot in the light switch box. When I replaced the surge protected strip with a simple non-surge protected power strip - all was well and the WS13A workes just fine.
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Sounds like the surge protection circuitry in your surge protected power strip was effectively "shorting" the X10 command signals to ground (known here as a "signal sucker"). This is a very common problem. Some "surge protectors" also include filtering to help eliminate "line noise" generated by the connected equipment. Unfortunately, this frequently includes the frequencies that X10 powerline signals use! If you want surge protection, buy a different model power strip (and make sure you can return it easily if it causes the same problem!).