Power cut - again

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  • mcockerell
    Automated Home Sr Member
    • Jan 2009
    • 74

    Power cut - again

    Last night we suffered our second power cut in nine days - this time we were better prepared!

    Shortly after we retired for the night, about two hours later, the power came back on - and so did most of the Idratek controlled lighting.
    However, none of the lights could be turned off - they can be operated by a mixture of Idratek buttons and momentary switches.
    As far as I know the IPD had been running on battery back-up while the power was off, but I had to trip the breaker to regain Reflex control.

    Am I right in thinking that the IPD didn't activate the fallback Reflex programming when the power failed?

    Martin
  • Karam
    Automated Home Legend
    • Mar 2005
    • 863

    #2
    Generally speaking the IPD is set up to activate Reflex mode when it detects that Cortex is unresponsive, not when there is a power cut unless of course this then causes the Cortex PC to shut down. However this isn't a default behaviour of an IPD in the sense that you have to deliberately set it up at some point by Reflex programming a watchdog into it and a watchdog refresh into Cortex. This can be either done explicitly (see help file) or via the general Reflex programming 'wizard'.

    It would also be possible to get a power cut to trigger a switch over - e.g. an IPD spur reset triggered by a power cut sense signal in the IPD, but I suppose in the normal course of events a power cut will mean that you can't operate lights anyway and if it is a short power cut which the PC's supply (e.g UPS or laptop battery) can bridge then it is better not to switch into Reflex mode. If it is longer then the IPD behaviour described above should then kick in.

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    • mcockerell
      Automated Home Sr Member
      • Jan 2009
      • 74

      #3
      The Cortex PC was shutdown sometime after the power failed; when we have a power cut it's often for a few hours, so the UPS has a power-down threshold set.

      When Cortex shutdown I had expected the IPD to switch into Reflex mode (the watchdog timer is set-up), but I guess I need to review and test the configuration again. I thought I had sorted this out last year when the Cortex PC locked up and I had to manually reset the IPD on that occasion too.

      Comment

      • mcockerell
        Automated Home Sr Member
        • Jan 2009
        • 74

        #4
        And the answer is really quite obvious having searched back in the forum - I didn't have the 'Leave active on network stop' option selected on the IPD timer.
        As Cortex was shutdown cleanly by the UPS the watchdog never timed out; I've just updated the timer behaviour and tested it by stopping the network.
        Everything now works as expected - I've increased the polling period to 2:30 so that I have 10 minutes to shutdown and restart Cortex if I need to.

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