September 10, 2003
Well, This is an unplanned update. I was walking past the tank...waiting for my 30 gallon per day RO unit SLOWLY makes enough water to fill it. Luckily it was late and the lights were off. I saw some flashes of light coming between the doors of the cabinet. I figured it was an LED on one of the power strips or something, but took a look anyway. Well, to my surprise, the 24" PC Coralife light fixture on the refugium was flashing a weak little flash every 2 seconds...hmmm this thing is supposed to be OFF! I turned the power switch off to the light and the flashing stopped. I then unplugged the unit from the X-10 module it is on, and plugged it into the wall...no flashing. I then plugged it in to the other 3 x-10 modules I have, all of them made it flash the little weak flashes every 2 seconds. I surmised this was from the sensing current...and I DON'T like it! I think this over the long run may be detrimental to the ballast, and since it was doing it on this one I know it is doing it on the other modules as well...I don't like leaking current period even if it is used for sensing. I ran to ReefCentral forums, and made a post for help, and in the meantime started doing some internet searching. I found a site with a schematic for the AM486 appliance module I am using for the light controls. Steven Bloom originally posted this to th home automation newsgroup. He had done the work for me! In his schematic, he showed how to disable the local sensing current. A few more pages explained that it was the local sensing current that was causing the flashes, and not the sensing of standard x-10 commands...ALLRIGHT!!! I can fix this! I previously modded the units to disable local sensing...but hadn't disabled the local sensing current. Here is the appliance control module we will be operating on:
The only thing standing in our way is one small screw between the prongs of the plug...here
We can take a look at the schematic...
