Indigo Domotics

I have moved into a new home--a manufactured home in a trailer park. I'm trying to get my X-10/Insteon devices to work in all of my wall outlets. Not happening. In some, it will work in one outlet, but not another in the same room!!

What do I do? Call an electrician? What do I tell him? The lights work fine, it's just that I can send a signal from my X-10 control box to turn the light on and off. My Indigo software on my computer doesn't work either. It's in a separate room. Although, it does operate with two wall outlets in the room I was talking about.

It's likely that the two phases of your house aren't bridged (I'm guessing manufactured housing also follows the two phase standard). You'll need to bridge them - for X10 you need an X10 bridge, for INSTEON you need two dual-band devices (including Access Points) to bridge the two phases. Also, for INSTEON to work consistently/correctly you need a neutral wire.

If you do have them bridged, then check out the signal troubleshooting page for common causes and solutions to signal issues.

jay wrote:

for X10 you need an X10 bridge, for INSTEON you need two dual-band devices (including Access Points) to bridge the two phases.

Does Insteon REQUIRE RF bridging? Since I had X10 for 20 years before updating to Insteon, I had long ago used the "500 Volt tantalum capacitor bridge" across a 220 V breaker, which seemed to work fine when I first began adding insteon devices. Although I have by now added enough dual band switches and applicance modules bought on various sales to probably insure multiple cross bridges, I never had any problems from the day I put in the first appliancelinc and found that, unlike Xtension to X10, Indigo would talk to every plug in the house.

For a reliable network you really do need a couple of INSTEON RF devices - one on each phase of your home. Just like X10, you might get by without doing it (and, in fact, the bridge you had in place for X10 may have helped) but it's generally best when you first start your INSTEON network to specifically place a couple of them. Access Points are the traditional way to do it but now that so many devices are dual-band you just need to ensure that 2 of them are on opposite phases.

jay wrote:

For a reliable network you really do need a couple of INSTEON RF devices - one on each phase of your home. Just like X10, you might get by without doing it (and, in fact, the bridge you had in place for X10 may have helped) but it's generally best when you first start your INSTEON network to specifically place a couple of them. Access Points are the traditional way to do it but now that so many devices are dual-band you just need to ensure that 2 of them are on opposite phases.

I assume that the cap isn't hurting anything since I still have about half a dozen old X10s left around on the short legs and the dual bands aren't going to bridge those... and I've also wondered if its possible to have too many dual band devices; are they smart enough not to "chatter" and keep rerepeating a command or acknowledgement back and forth between the PL and RF forever when I have a bunch of them scattered out throughout the house?

Some older X10 bridges have been known to adversely affect INSTEON traffic but given your lack of problems apparently yours isn't one of them.

The INSTEON protocol has hop-counts are supposed to keep that from happening - but I'm not an expert so you'd have to speak to SmartLabs/Smarthome about any potential issues.