X-10 and MSW?

[madlabs]

Anyone ever try to use X-10 controllers with a MSW inverter? I have some in a box somewhere but before I try to find them and experiment I thought I'd ask if anyone else has tried. I have a feeling that it won't work.

Thanks!

Jonathan

[OperaHouse]

It should because it is just carrier wave.  The real question is the power supply.  These have a capacitor to drop the voltage and square waves represent a much higher frequency and may cause excessive current.  There have been reports of pronlems with kill a watt devices and refrigerators with type of supply on MSW.  I run a noise filter on my MSW 10 ohm / .8uF and that doesn't have any heating problem.  The problem may be that many of these sipplies use a carbon film resistor for a current limiter.  These have very poor surge capacity and easily open up.  I replace a lot of these resistors that go bad.  I would pop the top, run it for a couple of minutes, remove power and do the old touch test to see if anything heats up excessivly.

[madlabs]

Opera,

I haven't had any problems so far with my fridge or kill a watt on this inverter. I take it the power filter you are talking is on the X10 module itself, correct? If so, is it between the mains and the dropping cap or is it after the dropping cap? I'm guessing after.

Thanks for the help! But now I'm gonna have to go dig through storage. Sigh.

Jonathan

[DamonHD]

My *guess* is that it won't work because the X-10 protocol injects the data bits near the zero crossing IIRC, and you will hardly get a clean sine-type crossing!

But that's a WAG: I'd be interested to know the actual answer.

Was just discussing X-10 with a real engineer today!

Rgds

Damon

[OperaHouse]

Line operated devices normally have a 10-75 ohm resistor in series with a .22 to .47uf cap that performs the actual voltage drop.  If anything will fail it will be that resistor.  Reolacing a failed resistor with a carbon composition or one of much higher wattage will fix that.   If you are thinking of using a dimming function, the phase angle trigger circuit may not work.  A simple on off probably will.

[boB]

I would say that may possibly work but I would not expect it to work because of the very noisy waveform and also that 0 crossing issue.

[Bruce S]

For what it's worth, I have an X-10 video send and receiver setup that are both on MSW's and though from time to time they have this fuzz go across the TV , I've had NO problems, except when the batteries go into LVD  .
Not the same as the dimmers or appliance modules, but ...
Bruce S

[DamonHD]

That video-send protocol is going to be a very very different animal to the few-bits-per-second home-control stuff I think.  They only thing they have in common is marketing I'll bet!

Rgds

Damon

[madlabs]

Thanks for all the info, folks. It was enough to motivate me to dig out the stuff. I plan to use the X10 to transmit small amounts of data. I have done this before on grid with sucess. I'm just sending a few bytes here and there, so re-tries and checksums used to get it there.

Jonathan