Power Failure Recovey process.

On Saturday night 8:30 - 9:30 I switched off my whole house to do my bit for earth-hour 2011. Thanks to Mick's post, which reminded me that, I also have an issue that I always forget to address but while I have some time I might as well try and get to the bottom of it.

I have a Cbus and Comfort installation, during a power failure my Cbus goes down and the Comfort system keeps running off it's batteries. On power-up my Cbus returns to it's preset power-recovery settings and it switches certain lights on if they were on previously.

My question is now, do the Cbus network send a corresponding 'On' command onto the bus once the power-recovery process completes or is it all internal?

The reason I ask is if I check my ComfortClient software it shows me all the lights that were recovered by this process is still down/off. Investigating further I found that I didn't receive a group update command from Cbus to Comfort which leads me to think that the power-recovery process is totally internal. It would be nice to get the corresponding group address updates as the lights recover, obviously after a few seconds and once the Cbus network has come up, to indicate to Comfort which lights are now in the On state. Once I manually switch the lights Off/On everything returns to normal and I forget that there ever was a problem.

Regards,
Ingo

 

The output units are the ones responsible for setting the lights back to their pre-power-failure state. They do not need to send a message onto C-Bus.

There is a process which uses special messages called MMIs which re-synchronises any devices which did not store the pre-power-failure state. All Clipsal C-Bus devices use these messages to maintain their state.

Manufacturers of other devices have to decide which level of compliance they want, and if they are level 3 or above, they will also deal with MMIs. I am not sure what level the Comfort system is.

 

Thanks Darren, I'll ask the Comfort guys if they have more information on their side.

Ingo

 

When Comfort detects the Power On message from the Cbus SIM, it sends a status request on the bus and this is able to update all the on/off status of the 256 Cbus lighting group addresses (although not the level for dimmers)
Hence Comfort should have the correct status after the power failure. You shoukld be able to verify that by checking the status of the cbus devices on the Control menu