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[vantech]

cm15a wont turn lights on but will turn them off.  Everything was working fine until tonight.  even plugged light module into same outlet as cm15a and nope nogo. DS10a will report with no problems, i even get emails from from ds10a macros with no problems. Im lost, tried rebooting several times to no avail.  Anybody got any ideas??!!!!!!

[vantech]

also the activity monitor shows the activity   

[JeffVolp]

Everything was working fine until tonight.

The first question I have is what changed in your electrical environment?  X10 powerline commands not working are usually the result of a noise source or signal sucker corrupting the X10 signals.  You may want to read some of the troubleshooting guides I wrote:

     http://jvde.us/x10_troubleshooting.htm

Jeff

[vantech]

Nothing changed, we left to go christmas shopping and came home and nothing was working. during the night though any of the lights i had left switched on through AHP (but were not coming on) came on, but i could not switch them off using AHP.  And yes i have a coupler installed at my breaker panel. Hmmmmmm....STRANGE now at this moment everything seems to be working.......             Any ideas as to what might have been going  on...Should i throw out the passive coupler and replace with a signal amp and passive coupler combined if there is a such an animal, im just not sure what happened

[JeffVolp]

It sounds like a noise source may have been blocking your X10 commands from being decoded.  Noise can be intermittent.  For an example, a cellphone charger can emit a horrendous amount of noise when recharging the batteries, and then back off to just a minor noise source when the batteries are charged.  Here is an example of one particularly nasty cellphone charger:
     
     http://jvde.us/x10/x10_cellet_noise.htm     

Jeff

[vantech]

Yeah i understand that but....we all charge our cell phones every night and have never had a problem and actually this morning the cell phone chargers were still on and charging when everything started working again.

[dave w]

Yeah i understand that but....we all charge our cell phones every night and have never had a problem and actually this morning the cell phone chargers were still on and charging when everything started working again.

I think the cell phone was just an example.
Users on the forum have had old CFL bulbs suddenly start making enough noise to create problems. One user suddenly had trouble which he traced to the neighbors CFL post lamp.

Could that be the case here? i.e. just because " nothing is new, nothing has changed" does not mean something behind the scene has not changed.

However your test of a Lamp Module in same socket as CM15A makes it sound like a CM15A problem to me.

[Noam]

...One user suddenly had trouble which he traced to the neighbors CFL post lamp...

Actually, it was a wall-mounted light on his front porch ;-)

But I wouldn't be surprised if a neighbors holiday lights (which are generally off during the daytime, and only on at night) might be causing the issue.
Try to test during the day, and then again as each neighbor turns on their lights.
If you are friendly with the neighbors, you could wait until your lights stop working, and then ask each neighbor (one at a time) to turn their lights off for a few minutes, so you can test.
If you find the neighbor whose lights are causing the problem, you can then ask if they would mid turning off each section of lights on at a time, so you can test which one might be causing the interference. You might want to offer to buy filters for them to plug their lights into.