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[dave w]

This is a long, windy, FWIW post about some problematic Power Flash modules. You don’t have to read the whole epistle, you can cut to the meat by skipping to the last paragraph.

I have a Power Flash monitoring the garage door position to announce if the door is open or closed. For the past several months there were times I could hear the door doing something but HomeSeer, my automation program, never told me what position the door had changed to. I traced the problem to the intermittent Power Flash module.

I elected to fix the problem the easy way and went down to the “X10 storeroom” in the basement to find another Power Flash. Lucky me, I had four more Power Flashes, so swapped out the suspect unit with an *OLD* “BSR Universal Interface” dating back to the early 1980’s when X10 was marketed by BSR. When that unit did not work, I pulled out the trusty XTBM signal/noise meter thinking I must have a noise problem. The XTBM did not register significant noise, so I went on to test the individual Power Flashes. After testing all five units, including the original garage unit, I found two units repeatedly sent codes which the XTBM interpreted as “ERR BSC”. The original intermittent garage unit would register “ERR BSC” or “ERR COL” and sometimes the actual x10 address it was set to.

I did not remember what the “ERR BSC” from the XTBM stood for and had mis-placed the XTBM instructions. So sent an email to Jeff Volp requesting another copy.
I speculated the tank circuit for the controller chip clock had drifted off frequency and the controller was sending gibberish. In the email to Jeff I told him, my theory and said I planned on trying to blindly retune the clock tank while monitoring the Power Flashes output, in hopes of tuning it back to the correct frequency.
Jeff indicated that might be a possibility but also suggested a dried out electrolytic cap in the modules power supply circuitry. Well in the old BSR module, probably close to 30 years old, that made much more sense than the clock circuit drifting off freq.

As unbelievable as it sounds, the local Radio Shark store had in stock the 1000uf  35V capacitor, at a mere $1.79.
This wandering, long story is being shortened to: the electrolytic cap fixed the problem. Which saved me trying to separate the two Power Flash PC boards with jumpers and then tweeking the clock tank tunable coil in hope of getting lucky…which of course would not have happened.

A thank you to Jeff for redirecting my trouble shooting.

So for you knowledgeable electronic technicians out there, the lesson is: If you have old-old X10 modules (especially transmitting modules) which have stopped functioning, and your component replacement/soldering skills are up to snuff. Just “shotgun” troubleshoot the module by replacing the large electrolytic filter cap. It is likely to be the largest “can style” cap on the board, and remember it is polarity sensitive. Installing one backwards produces a quick and violent “BANG – SMOKE” reaction. So the Power Flash would live up to it's name. 

[Brian H]

I fixed a RR501 the same way.
Changed the filter caps.
I also replaced the zener diode with two of half the original voltage rating. So each was at about 50% of what one was wattage wise. The solder on the original had gotten scaled and the PCB looked blackened from all the heat.