Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[entirelynutz]

I had an XPCR coupler installed in my breaker panel box for over 10 years with no problems whatsoever. Unfortunately about a month ago I stated having devices not respond to CM15A commands. After trouble shooting I was able to determine that only modules on the same phase would respond to the CM15A. If I plugged the CM15A into the other phase I was able to determine that the modules not responding previously were now working but the ones that had been working no longer worked.

I figured that the unit had just lived out its usable life span. I purchased a new XPCR and installed it in the panel box. Everything began working as it had for years. Unfortunately after about two weeks the new module stopped working. Nothing significant has changed in our electric configuration.

Any ideas what would cause two XPCR coupler/repeaters to fail over a short period of time? Thanks for reading and any ideas/suggestions are appreciated.

[Brian H]

Is your power from the street OK?
I have seen surges, noise spikes and occasionally a poor Neutral.
Kill or damage electronics.
I smoked an XPCR in my tester.
I got the neutral miss wired and floating. Smoked the MOV surge absorbers.
Luckily it needed only a new set of MOV components,

[entirelynutz]

I haven't had any street power issues. The neutral bus seems fine and the first one was wired there for 10 years.

What are the MOV surge absorbers? Is this a component inside the XPCR? Is that something that can be replaced easily and if so where would one obtain replacements?

[Brian H]

Although there are MOV's and fuses inside the XPCR.
It is not easily done and I don't think this could be your problem.
There are 240VAC connections and should only be done it you have knowledge of what  you are doing.
I would try and think of other possibilities. Like surges and voltage spikes.
Or the first one died from age and the newer one was not as good as the original was.
The one I did was Date Code 11C13. 2011 week 13
 

[entirelynutz]

We are running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4. The CM15A is connected to the Pi and X10 is controlled by Mochad integration. We are also running TriggerCMD on a different computer so we can send commands to the HA environment to control devices. TriggerCMD interfaces with Alexa and Google Assistant as they all get linked together. We got a new Samsung TV at Christmas and found that you could control that with Smarthings application. We linked up Smartthings with Home Assistant and apparently that got all screwed up. For some weird reason Smartthings kept getting into eternal loops with TriggerCMD commands and would continually loop making calls to X10 devices very fast. It seems like it was overwhelming the CM15A and flooding our electric system with noise resulting in what appeared to be a bridge failure. Since we seldom look at the computer that runs TriggerCMD we were unaware of these runaway zombie processes. We actually found them by accident. We have subsequently removed Smartthings from Home Assistant and our phones, etc. Since we cleaned up everything related to Smarthings I re-installed my original XPCR in my panel box and it is working like it had for 10 years.

All along I was looking for some kind of hardware issue and it turned out to be software related.

Thanks for all your help and suggestions.

[brobin]

Thanks for posting what you found. Very interesting and something nobody would have thought of.

[Brian H]

Good to see you have found the problem and successfully got it fixed.