2413U suddenly stops receiving INSTEON signals

Matt, I finally got the chance to test out the entire high-draw breaker box and apparently identified the circuits that are generating the problem. It's two doubles and a triple that run, in order, the garage door motor, the garage dehumidifier and the heater pump. The one that seems to have the quickest effect is, oddly enough, the garage door motor breaker.

I'm really happy to have apparently narrowed it down. Now my main concern is: What the heck can I do about it? It's not as simple as installing a FilterLinc in an outlet, since the garage door motor appears to be wired directly to the breaker box and appears to have a much higher draw than a FilterLinc is designed to handle.

Another small couple of issues: First one: With the offending breakers off I can send an "All Lights On" command and it will work flawlessly 95% of the time. There's bound to be a couple of errors here and there which I guess I could live with. When I send an "All Lights Off" command the same devices I just flicked on will respond, but VERY slowly and with noticeably greater number of errors. In testing today it took over 3 minutes to turn the whole house off, while it took maybe 15 seconds to flick it on. However, if I issue the "All Lights Off" command a second time, everything will flick off in seconds. Noise again? Unbridged phases? The house has at least 7 devices per floor, none further than a few feet from the other and no further than 10 feet from devices on other floors. I assume if it's not repeating well over the power wiring, it should have no problem repeating over RF.

The other one: I have one device, a KeypadLinc Dimmer that has refused to be found all but once, with all the high-draw circuits off. I naively thought it would be easily found again if I deleted it it and re-added it to test the network there, but never could. The odd thing is once it was found it would respond to on/off commands, physically turning the light on and off, but it would always report an error. Odder still is that it's in the same room as two other KeypadLincs which work perfectly. One of them is a few inches away from the one I can't seem to get Indigo to talk to.

Thanks for all your help!

[matt (support)]

You might try asking Smarthome about how to filter the garage door motor circuit. I don't have any experience with them, but Smarthome.com does sell some inline filters that might help. Note that filters that work with X10 should also help with INSTEON.

It sounds like even once that is isolated you have a few other signal gremlins you need to isolate. The ON commands working faster/more reliably than the OFF means that one of the light loads itself is causing noise when it is ON. Try turning on different sets of lights until you can identify which light/bulb is causing the problem.

The KeypadLinc dimmer may be a malfunctioning module. But note it might also be power line noise. You said that you have other KeypadLincs a few inches from the one that isn't working, but note they may be on a completely different electrical circuits. You could try swapping one of the working KPLs with the bad one. If the bad one still fails (and the new one works in the previously bad location), then I think that would prove it is a marginal KPL (versus a power line noise issue).

Could you post a follow-up to this? I have developed some powerline noise and have isolated it to two circuits. One is a 240 V circuit and the other is a standard 120. However I continue to have powerline noise even when there is nothing I can find plugged into either circuit. I'm thinking a filter at the breaker box directly would solve the issue?