drvnbysound
Senior Member
I've seen it a few times on the system I installed earlier this year. The system had (2) XRFTW's and approx. 30 of the Elk 2-way sensors.
Apologies and another question
- Thread starter mikefamig
- Start date
I'd think the Elk RF is more susceptible as it "tunes" itself to maximize it's range, battery life and reception vs. a device like, say, an ITI/GE contact or the Honeywell 5816's. The Elk, by nature, isn't going to be transmitting at full signal output 99% of the time. Not faulting it, but it's the nature of the beast. The Elk transceiver is always going to be transmitting at it's maximum allowable output, it's just the nature of the device itself.
The other consideration, I know Elk used to publish the specs on the GE receiver and Honewell in regards to it's sensitivity and I'm willing to bet that the lack of antennas is also going to come into play with it's performance overall.
The other consideration, I know Elk used to publish the specs on the GE receiver and Honewell in regards to it's sensitivity and I'm willing to bet that the lack of antennas is also going to come into play with it's performance overall.
Well this morning after seven days of running perfectly my system had a restart followed by all of the zones attached to the xin in the garage being bypassed. It then resumed normal operation.
Yesterday I changed the rule that auto-arms the garage slightly. Instead of checking the arm state every five minutes I check every ten minutes. A few days ago I disabled a rule to dial out on the phone when there is an alarm. The garage keypad is still not installed and has not been since last Monday.
I made no other changes.
Mike.
Yesterday I changed the rule that auto-arms the garage slightly. Instead of checking the arm state every five minutes I check every ten minutes. A few days ago I disabled a rule to dial out on the phone when there is an alarm. The garage keypad is still not installed and has not been since last Monday.
I made no other changes.
Mike.
I hope you guys don't mind but at this point I'm using the forum to document my changes for future reference. It will end up in the archives and may even help someone in the future.
Yesterday I replaced the cat cable that attaches the xin and ovr devices in the garage to the dbh. I had used homemade cables that I crimped the plugs on myself and replaced them with factory manufactured cables. I bought a seven foot cable, tested it with an electronic tester, cut the cable in half and used it as two cables with the plug end in the dbh and the wire end in each device. This removes the possibility of one of my self crimped plugs having a fault. I will also re-install the garage keypad today. Then I wait and see what happens again.
Mike.
Yesterday I replaced the cat cable that attaches the xin and ovr devices in the garage to the dbh. I had used homemade cables that I crimped the plugs on myself and replaced them with factory manufactured cables. I bought a seven foot cable, tested it with an electronic tester, cut the cable in half and used it as two cables with the plug end in the dbh and the wire end in each device. This removes the possibility of one of my self crimped plugs having a fault. I will also re-install the garage keypad today. Then I wait and see what happens again.
Mike.
drvnbysound
Senior Member
Sounds good... I'm still following along waiting for the smoking gun 
DELInstallations said:
Last night I had another restart with all of the zones on the xin in the garage bypassing....same as last time. Today I removed the 3M crimp splices, twisted the wires, soldered and used heat shrink tubing for the connections. Now I'll wait and and see what happens again.
Part of my problem here is that I am losing my memory. It occurred to me recently that I had a problem with the p212s in the garage running as high as 17vdc back when I first installed the system. I replaced the power supply with the altronix and things seemed ok. Now I'm thinking that the m1xin may have been damaged by the power supply. If soldering these splices doesn't help I may just replace the xin. I'm in no hurry as the system is fully functioning and even resumes normally after the restarts.
Mike.
That may be true, but with RF, what works perfectly fine one day may have issues the next if anything environmental changes. Happens all the time with far more complex equipment (the company I work for/with installs RF BAS components and those have much more lenience and are more robust than Elk RF and they still occasionally glitch)mikefamig said:
mikefamig said:
Well I replaced the keypad with soldered splices and the system ran well for about a week but then had an auto-restart of the xin in the garage. As mentioned earlier I had a splice in the rs-485 that goes to the garage that I used 3M crimp connectors on. A week ago today (Friday 12/5) I soldered those connections using a western union splice and heat shrink tubing.I'm told that the twist in a western union splice will reduce the risk of EMI interference at the splice. The cable is in a conduit with another cat5e and the 16awg 12 volt power line for the garage. There are no high voltage lines in the conduit. So far so good.
Notice that for the past few weeks I have been troubled by auto-restarts....there hasn't been an errant chime in quite a while.
Mike.
DELInstallations said:
The m1xrftw is advertised to dynamically adjust power level each time it communicates with a sensor until it gets acknowledgement that the signal was received. Here is a quote from their sales flyer:
"Constantly monitors and adjusts ideal RF power level to deliver clear signal while maximizing battery life"
Mike.
drvnbysound
Senior Member
Right. Basically the battery powered sensors will reduce Tx power (based on receipt of ACK messages) accordingly - as opposed to sending messages at full power every time.
This makes perfect sense to me. I mean, why transmit at full power if you're only 15-ft away from the receiver and you have a range of 3,000 ft? (I don't know the range of the Elk wireless sensors - I arbitrarily picked 3000-ft).
Reduce power and save battery life? Yes, please!!
This makes perfect sense to me. I mean, why transmit at full power if you're only 15-ft away from the receiver and you have a range of 3,000 ft? (I don't know the range of the Elk wireless sensors - I arbitrarily picked 3000-ft).
Reduce power and save battery life? Yes, please!!
Update
It's been twelve days since my system has had an errant chime or auto-restart and in hindsight (this thread started Aug 25) I have to say that my problems were caused by my wiring mistakes. There was finally a big reduction in errors after soldering the keypad splices and no errors since soldering the splices in the long cable run to the garage twelve days ago. The keypad had the bean type crimps that came with it and the garage run had those little round 3M crimp connectors, both gel filled.
I'm finally having some fun with this thing. I have my first four UPB lights that are automated with garage doors and alarm, the garage doors are automated to close when armed and the sump pump sends me a text if it has a problem. Time to take a little break from it and think about the end game for the system. I want to keep it simple enough for my wife to use and I want a minimum of maintenance. I've accomplished that so far but I can see this thing getting out of hand pretty fast with all the cool stuff out there. I want the system to make my life easier and I don't want it to be something that I have to work on all the time to maintain. Time to slow down and work on points for style.
Mike.
It's been twelve days since my system has had an errant chime or auto-restart and in hindsight (this thread started Aug 25) I have to say that my problems were caused by my wiring mistakes. There was finally a big reduction in errors after soldering the keypad splices and no errors since soldering the splices in the long cable run to the garage twelve days ago. The keypad had the bean type crimps that came with it and the garage run had those little round 3M crimp connectors, both gel filled.
I'm finally having some fun with this thing. I have my first four UPB lights that are automated with garage doors and alarm, the garage doors are automated to close when armed and the sump pump sends me a text if it has a problem. Time to take a little break from it and think about the end game for the system. I want to keep it simple enough for my wife to use and I want a minimum of maintenance. I've accomplished that so far but I can see this thing getting out of hand pretty fast with all the cool stuff out there. I want the system to make my life easier and I don't want it to be something that I have to work on all the time to maintain. Time to slow down and work on points for style.
Mike.
One last post here to report that it's been over a month and the system seems to be perfect. After finding and fixing the wiring problems I still had an automatic system restart and that was cured by rolling back the M1 firmware from V5.3 to V5.2.10 as advised by Elk. That was about three weeks ago and all is well.
So to sum it up all of my troubles were caused by crimp style connectors on the rs-485 and a firmware bug/bugs. I would have saved myself a lot of pain if I had just made ordinary splices on the data bus instead of trusting the crimp connectors. From now on I will solder everything on the data bus or at the very least I will strip and physically splice all connections and then cap them with a crimp or wire nut.
Do not believe anyone who tells you that you do not have to strip a wire when using their crimp connector. It only takes one failure to cause a whole lot of pain.
Mike.
So to sum it up all of my troubles were caused by crimp style connectors on the rs-485 and a firmware bug/bugs. I would have saved myself a lot of pain if I had just made ordinary splices on the data bus instead of trusting the crimp connectors. From now on I will solder everything on the data bus or at the very least I will strip and physically splice all connections and then cap them with a crimp or wire nut.
Do not believe anyone who tells you that you do not have to strip a wire when using their crimp connector. It only takes one failure to cause a whole lot of pain.
Mike.
DELInstallations said:
DEL
You might find this interesting....
My system has been running error free for many months now and I decided to do a little experiment to see if the p212s was causing any of my problems in the past. I disconnected the altronix from the garage and re-installed the p212s to replace it. I wanted to see if any of my troubles returned and also thought that as long as I have the device it would be nice to use it and free up the altronix for other use.
Well it was all good for a few days but then I had a 1367 system restart. Then good for a while again and another system restart. I'm thinking now that I may be getting brownouts/glitches on my house power and that maybe the p212s is not a zero voltage drop device and is not protecting the elk from fluctuations in the house current as well as the Altronix does.
Next thing I did was to look at the install instructions for the p212s and there is no mention of it being a zero voltage drop supply so I posted the question on the Elk support forum and here is the answer:
"In the case of AC power outage or dip the voltage would only drop to the voltage of the connected battery. Technically a good charged battery will hold the voltage at the supply’s ~13.8V."
So I am taking that to mean that there is no guarantee that the p212s will maintain zero voltage drop in a switch to battery power. I reverted back to the Altronix yesterday and will see how that goes. I expect that I won't have any more problem. Thanks for steering me in the right direction.
Mike.
Did you have the P212S connected to the data bus, or operating in standalone mode? If you had it on the data bus, it would be interesting to try it in standalone mode to see if it is the P212S data bus interface that causes problems, or whether it is truly a drop in the output voltage that then caused the zone expanders to have trouble.
