CF50Ds malfunctioning

[Duckie24]

I have 3 CF50Ds.  They have been working fine this year since I turned my lights on 3 weeks ago.  We had a major storm come through last night and my MegaTree was severely damaged requiring major clean-up today.  I had my lights on to see what else was damaged.  I will call my floods "1", "2", and "3" now.  I ran my lights all on loop that cycles the floods between green and red.  Flood 3 was on, but I noticed 1 and 2 were not on.  I have them plugged into an outdoor power stake, it has a timer.  The power went out during the storm and I noticed that the timer stake had reverted from "On" to "Off".  I turned it back on.  Flood 2 came on, but Flood 1 did not.  I messed with the cables and Flood 1 briefly came on, but then went back off.  During this time I noticed that Flood 3, which was previously on, was now off.  It was variably on and off for a couple minutes, then off for good.  All other controllers daisy-chained with these were working fine.  I turned on the Hardware Utility and it found NONE of the floods, but all of my other controllers.  I cycled power, no joy.  Flood 2, although not found, was still working fine, so I removed Floods 1 & 3 from the network completely and brought them inside.  I ran Hardware Utility again and still it did not find Flood 2, but did find all other controllers.  I started my All On loop again, and Flood 2 worked.  Started my Schedule and Flood 2 worked fine.  

I'm not exactly sure what is going on here.  I've never had the lights open, so they should still be water-tight.  I'm open to any ideas for troubleshooting.

Thanks.

 

[Mega Arch]

Open the connectors. Shake em dry. I used a stiff brush to clean them. Use a hair dryer to dry ( I'm too impatient to let them air dry). 

Good luck. 

[Mr. P]

The connectors are just a barrel connector with a cat5 coupler inside them. If you take them off it's just an ordinary cat5 with a plain rj45 on the end, don't be afraid to take them apart and clean them out.

[Duckie24]

I took one of them apart yesterday and didn't notice any water.  Reassaembled and still had no luck with it coming on.  I brought the 2 non-functioning ones inside since it seemed no point to have them outside.  I plan to connect them individually with new Cat5 to see if the hardware utility finds them.  If not, Help Ticket time.  Can't understand why the one flood is still working flawlessly yet is not identified on the network.

[whyintheworld]

Duckie - I don't have floods yet, but do  you have the controller number set by the dip switches instead of just the hardware utility?  If I understand correctly, when they lose power they will revert to the dip switch controller number if it was only set via the hardware utility.  So it could be that when #3 was still working with the other two powered off, there was no conflict, but when you powered 1/2 back on then there was a controller # conflict...?  Although that doesn't explain why it is still running fine and not found on the network.  I'm interested in hearing what fixes things for you as I'm pretty sure I'm going to add the floods one way or another for next year.

[Duckie24]

I just saw this same thing in another thread regarding the floods and reverting to DIP switch setting.  I'm currently still rebuilding my MegaTree from the storm this weekend, so haven't had a chance to troubleshoot.  I did take the barrel connectors off and all connections look dry.  The unit I left in place is still working without a problem, and still not found on network.  My next plan was to connect each flood individually to computer and see if they are found.  If they lose their ID when losing power, that is a real pain.  Seems odd too, because I don't remember resetting the unit ID this year when I put them out.  I swear they all had the same unit ID that I had set them to last year, and I know I checked to make sure they had IDs because they were new last year and I forgot to label them so I used HU to check their ID at start of this season and I labelled them.

[Randy]

I have 4 of these floods and had some very weird behavior from one of them.  It was evidently putting out some noise and/or spurious signals out on the network connection that was causing all sorts of weird behavior with many of my other controllers.  Lots of channels across my whole system would start shimmering endlessly, sticking on, not turning on, you name it.  It took me a couple of days to figure out that it was one of my new CF50 floodlights.  As soon as I disconnected the network connections and hooked the wires up to a coupler to bypass the flood, then everything went normal.  Hooked the flood back up, and the trouble started right up again...Very weird behavior....

[Duckie24]

I finally got a chance to test my floods this evening.  Completely disconnected from the network, Hardware Utility found them no problem.  I checked both connectors and each worked fine.  Tested with both a factory Cat5 cable, and one of the cables that was attached during failure.  I didn't pull the other Cat5 that was connected to them, as I needed it to still run the rest of the network. Tested all channels, and they worked fine.  The only other thing I didn't do was daisy-chain them together and see if network could find them.  I plan to put them back in the yard tomorrow and see if they are working there.

whyintheworld, I double-checked the documentation for the flood, and it specifically states the Unit ID is stored in permanent memory when using HU, so I don't think it is lost in a power outage.  Mine were fine after sitting in garage since Sunday.

[k6ccc]

Duckie,  If the three floods were the last three devices on the network, you could have a problem either with the cable from the upstream controller to the first flood or a connector problem on that upstream controller.