Cbus System Failure

Looking for some troubleshooting ideas. A house with Clipsal installed for about a year. All of the problems seem to have begun after a recent thunderstorm in the area. It is a wired system which includes a desktop touchscreen, wiser, relay and dimmer modules, and one PCI (used for integration with RTI). Here is what we are experiencing. All of the keypads (Saturn) in the house are flashing orange and blue. We looked at the relays/dimmers and noticed cbus lights flashing, but unit lights were good. We removed the RS232 DB connector out of the face of the PCI. Then, the relays/dimmers cbus lights came back on steady, and the keypads started working in the house. This worked for about 15minutes, then same issues started again. The RTI contractor reconnected the RS232 to our PCI and still nothing works. The next day, we removed the RS232 cable again and the system started working, again for about 15minutes. Wierd. Also, we can connect to the WISER CNI and see application logs, but are unable to scan the network. Any suggestions on what components or wiring to look at first??

 

Hi Tidefan,

Having been a recent recipient of a lightning strike myself, I feel your pain. Luckily, my C-Bus network is well protected with surge arrestors and a big UPS so it mostly only toasted some of my data network.

You suggest that the PCI is still working as you used Toolkit, so I would suggest that you download the C-Bus Diagnostics Utility and run it on your PC and connect to the PCI.

You can set it to both watch the network traffic (The Traffic Analyser- sorry Analyzer ;-) ) to a greater degree than the Toolkit log, and also run a module test (the Reliability Test) on it which may point you toward a few module culprits that are scrambling comms on the C-Bus. One or several modules may be intermittent. It directly displays good and bad packets on the network so if the bad packets are a high percentage, it will hopefully point at your source/sources.

You may also see some low C-Bus voltages if a power supply or supplies has died (using 'Get C-Bus Voltages'). You should have > about 21-22 volts at all modules for solid reliable comms.

Good Luck,

Brad

 

Updated. Problem solved. PCI was damaged by lightning surge. Removed unit and everything is working fine once again. Tks.