Insteon / Elk

[Len12121]

About 5-6 lights have turned on by themselves.
Have not had the problem since installing 85 Insteon switches about 7 months ago.
The only things changed in the last days before leaving this house for the winter was to install wireless camera and put in jumper in Elk M1EXP to update elk rm about light status.
Looked at camera last night and to my astonishment lights were on.
Builder went in today and shut them off. some immediately turned on by themselves. Touching off again and light stayed off.
Any ideas???

 

[DavidL]

About 5-6 lights have turned on by themselves.
Have not had the problem since installing 85 Insteon switches about 7 months ago.
The only things changed in the last days before leaving this house for the winter was to install wireless camera and put in jumper in Elk M1EXP to update elk rm about light status.
Looked at camera last night and to my astonishment lights were on.
Builder went in today and shut them off. some immediately turned on by themselves. Touching off again and light stayed off.
Any ideas???

By chance any of them linked? Do you have X10 addresses associated within them? Likely Noise on the powerline.

 

[Len12121]

About 5-6 lights have turned on by themselves.
Have not had the problem since installing 85 Insteon switches about 7 months ago.
The only things changed in the last days before leaving this house for the winter was to install wireless camera and put in jumper in Elk M1EXP to update elk rm about light status.
Looked at camera last night and to my astonishment lights were on.
Builder went in today and shut them off. some immediately turned on by themselves. Touching off again and light stayed off.
Any ideas???

By chance any of them linked? Do you have X10 addresses associated within them? Likely Noise on the powerline.

These lights that turned on are not linked to each other. No x-10 involved.
These switches have been installed for months with no problem.
Can the wireless camera cause line interference ??

 

[opie]

Make sure you are on the latest Insteon Firmware for the M1XSP. This was a known issue with some of the older firmware.

 

[Len12121]

Make sure you are on the latest Insteon Firmware for the M1XSP. This was a known issue with some of the older firmware.

I believe that I am on latest firmware for insteon 50.0.26.
I did change jumper on M1XSP(I beleive S3) to poll switches 4 days ago. Could this cause my light problem, thinking it took a long time to poll switches and maybe we left before polling was done. All suggestions appreciated since I am not going back untill December for a week and fearfull of having very bright house.

 

[shenandoah75]

I had a post sometime ago, where i claimed that elk changed my thermostat temp while sending ASCII commands over the ethernet interface to control other devices (e.g. my lights)... I acknowledge it's not identical, but i think we could still be in the same boat. At the time i was testing CQC and Dean swore (and believe him foor various reasons including the next paragrap that it wasn't because CQC sending the wrong commands).

I had this happen yet again a couple of weeks ago... all i was doing was testing Elk rules i have to turn on ligts automatically when i arm in away mode and it hits a specific time of evening. There are NO rules that set temp based on light changes, only two automations rules (temp up to 82 and temp down to 78) on F5/F6 button presses (which in turn activate the automation task). I happened to walk by the Tstat and saw it was at 82 and in "Rmeote mode' (i use HAI)


At the times this happened, I couldn't spend the time to debug further, but i really think that elk is somehow misinterpretting the strings or handingly them twice in part. I need to iron down the exact sequence of commands and work backwards with the command reference form the increment or set temp commands and see how it could overlap, but i'm convinced there's some overlap in the strings...

I'm sure until i prove it, i will be looked at as a loon, but oh well...

-brad

 

[bmil]

I've had the same problem myself and it finally drove me to give up on Insteon entirely recently despite my rather substantial $$ and time investment. However I just always assumed it was the buggy Insteon devices (heaven knows of all the other QC problems Insteon has). The install is at my vacation home and my next trip up I'll disconnect my XSP connection to the PLC for a few days to see if the problem goes away. I've never had polling turned on so that's not it.

My experience has been that out of about 28 Insteon devices only 3 or 4 seemed to have the "magic on" problem. Many times it involved a switch turning back on within a minute or 2 of turning it off manually. On each problem switch I double checked to make sure it didn't have a residual x10 address assigned.

Oh well, I'm still giving up on Insteon due to a 30% failure rate on the switches over a 2 year period..

 

[mustangcoupe]

I have this problem and have unplugges the plc connected to the ELK and all was ok for two days. when I plugged it back in it turned on my kitchen light again that night. I need to check my firmware versions though...

 

[shenandoah75]

FYI - note that in my case lighitng integration is zwave (viziarf) not insteon. Regardless, per the symptoms described and mustangs last post, i still think the issue is coming from elk and not from the lighting devices themselves...

Curious to everyone posting, do you ave any automation tasks that would run while this would have happened and what would they be? tasks fired by rules? or direction event calls to devices/outputs?


in my case, something in the following:
timed firing automation tasks in the range of 5-11
which in turn turns on/off lighting outputs in the range of 98 (G2) - 125 (H13)
seems to trigger either an increment of temp or a direct setting of it on TSTAT#1



Also, this was my original posting:
http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=8042

The original direction of the inadvertant change was the opposite of what i stated above:
1) changing temp remotely (via tcp connection to M1EXP) turned on lights
(i noticed this a couple of times with CQC, but also via a custom program i wrote to test)
2) However, the other night, direction switched and turning off/on lights (via time based tasks) changed the TSTAT





i hope to dig into this hopefully by the weekend... unfortunately because of the gaps programming vizia creates when you messup and the inability to move/shift/reorder nodes, it's hard to narrow down my lighting range without redoing the whole network...

-brad

 

[Len12121]

Checking camera tonite and at least two items on. Stair sconce and family room fan.
Only things changed recently were :
Set up polling in M1XSP with jumper S3
Added wireless camera in Kitchen (noise on line?)

Iam 2000 miles from hose and will have neighbor turn items off tomorrow.

Any other ideas??

 

[Len12121]

Checking camera tonite and at least two items on. Stair sconce and family room fan.
Only things changed recently were :
Set up polling in M1XSP with jumper S3
Added wireless camera in Kitchen (noise on line?)

Iam 2000 miles from hose and will have neighbor turn items off tomorrow.

Any other ideas??

I mean house....sorry

 

[opie]

Checking camera tonite and at least two items on. Stair sconce and family room fan.
Only things changed recently were :
Set up polling in M1XSP with jumper S3
Added wireless camera in Kitchen (noise on line?)

Iam 2000 miles from hose and will have neighbor turn items off tomorrow.

Any other ideas??

I think it's possible the polling could cause this. I still have some X-10 switches in locations where I do not have a neutral. When I tried to use the polling feature, my X-10 lights went nuts and turned on and off all the time by themselves. I really doubt the camera has anything to do with it. I added a Panasonic IP Camera a few weeks ago and saw no side effects from it.

Is your neighbor savvy enough you could walk them through changing the jumper back to the non-polling position?

 

[shenandoah75]

Might be reason you're not doing this, but while you try to identify cause, why not do one of the following as a stop gap to avoid the frustration on your end and pinging the neighbor ?

1) put in an automation event that explicitly turns off your lights at set intervals or at lease the one you know shouldn't be on

- or -

2) open up your router for port forwarding into the m1xep and turn em off yourself when you see it happen...

Of course if it's not open now, guess you'd have to phsically be there to enable either option...

-brad

 

[snhroc]

Interestingly, I've been having similar issues in the last couple of months. No issues for over a year, and now I have lights spontaneously turning on.. or sometimes turning on within seconds of turning them off from a wall switch

 

[Len12121]

Friend went in the house today. Found 16 lights and fans on . Some that he shut off came right back on but shut off with second attempt. Had him remove PLC from power and leave unplugged until I visit in December. I hope it is that I enabled polling otherwise I have no idea. This never happened while we were there for the summer.

Any other ideas appreciated..