Insteon now or wait?

The point that's important is that it's possible, especially with a new, largely untested design to have more than the one defect that we seem to all agree on, flickering. Or that it's possible that continued filament flickering might cause some up until now unknown physical failure in the bulb.

Any search on "light bulb injuries" brings you to famous cases.

A bad switch doesn't have to make a light bulb explode in order to help kill you. Premature bulb failure can lead to other consequential damage. Some poor kid showed how even a defect that only causes light bulbs to burn out prematurely can have fatal consequences:

-

"Youth falls from ladder and dies while changing light bulb. He received massive head injuries and died enroute to the hospital."

As a vendor, I suspect you'd rather not sell products that have to be returned for any reason, right? Smarthome should have suspended sales until they fixed the current problem for the sake of all the other businessmen involved with them as installers or vendors. Every time you change a light bulb, there is a definite, non-zero risk you may be electrocuted, killed by falling from a ladder or injured by broken glass. Every time. If defective switches cause a substantial reduction in the light bulb changing interval, they have increased that risk of injury.

When Smarthome became aware of the problem, they should have taken the remaining inventory and let it out as beta test equipment to search out any other defects they might have missed. Instead, they sold it without informing purchasers they had discovered a substantial defect. They let poor end users do the beta testing for them. What benefit did those buyers between March and July earn as their reward? Apparently only the right to own bad switches they paid full freight for and would have to pay more money to exchange. That's dirty pool in my book.

They made a serious error and they are *still* letting it careen out of control. That's going to be bad for Insteon for a long time to come. Product liability is a different animal in the era of the Internet and lots of companies still haven't gotten the 411. They owe anyone who purchased a defective switch between March and July more than just a bloody refund.

They deceived their customers deliberately to enhance their sales and market position. Now they need to pay the full freight for making them whole. If that means paying electricians to yank those switches and install something else, well, that's what happens when you scrimp on your beta testing and you sell items that you know to have a material defect without disclosing said defect.

They didn't give customers a chance to decide to wait until they fixed the problem. More importantly, they had every reason to believe customers could and would incur considerable expense installing and removing those switches that they knew were defective.

-- Bobby G.

Agreed, but it isn't really necessary to guaranty zero possibility of failure to protect oneself against product liability. Certainly anyone can sue with or without just cause in this country. However, most serious cases require some sort of proof that the maker "knew or should have known" that there was a real hazard.

That would depend in part on the type of bulb. I've spent considerable time designing and installing lighting systems and I've seen lots of equipment failures but none of the type we're considering here. A common 110V, screw-in light bulb won't separate from the base due to flickering. The filament will burn out early but the bulb itself won't rupture and it won't come away from the base. Those bulbs sometiomes separate when they've been screwed in too tightly or if they've been allowed to rust, say in an outdoor fixture, but the separation is due to physical force used in trying to insert or remove the bulb. The only bulbs I've seen blow up were inside stage lighting fixtures where there was no danger to the audience.

Presumably the switch would have been tested quite a bit prior to release. In order to pass UL it has to survive testing.

The horror of it was that even while Columbia was in orbit some of the NASA engineers warned that the damage might cause a disaster. Management decided not to investigate the damage more fully. Had they done so the disaster might have been prevented.

Apparently that was not the case, Bob. Recent news reports claim that highway officials were warned that there was a serious danger. They decided to ignore the reports.

TTBOMK, product liability claims need to show that the maker (or installer) "knew or should have known" that there was a danger. If one builds in good faith, follows the standards and codes (in this case, UL, NEC and establishged engineering practices), takes reasonable precautions to assure the user's safety and warns of any known hazards, the manufacturer will be reasonably safe from lawsuits.

FWIW, I don't exactly side with Smarthome. I don't want to bash them but suffice it to say I'm not interested in selling Insteon or most of their name brand products. Others like them and feel they're getting decent quality for the price. I won't debate that. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I just disagree with you about Smarthome being in danger of a product liability suit due to what appears to be just an annoying design problem. I could be wrong. I'm not a lawyer though I did study business law. I did not, however, sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night. :^)

I knew a guy who installed an X-10 110VAC wall switch in a high voltage commercial lighting circuit - the ones designed to run at 208 volts. The result was the same. I saved the melted switch for my collection. It looked like that painting with the watches draped over the tree branches.

-- Bobby G.

Yes, it does.

No, 'fraid not, Jack:

LOS ANGELES -- Argh! Teri Hatcher be wearin' an eye patch, me hearties.

No, the "Desperate Housewives" star isn't giving a preview of the spring's new pirate-chic look, but is recovering from an eye injury sustained Tuesday (April 25) on the set of her hit ABC show, reports People.

The actress was present when a light bulb exploded unexpectedly on set.

"Glass lodged in my right eye and proceeded to scratch my cornea," Hatcher describes in gruesome detail. "I was taken to a wonderful eye doctor, and am now wearing a most glamorous eye patch over the right half of my face."

Jack, light bulbs explode all the time. Just because you haven't seen it happen personally (which I find hard to believe, actually) is no proof that it doesn't happen. But just in case you think Hatcher's case was just a freak accident:

"Between late 1993 and December 1996, Tensor received approximately 330 incidents of exploding halogen bulbs, some causing extensive property damage and personal injuries."

Unless they've had personal experience like Bob Bass and I have, people don't realize how light bulbs can be a continuous source of personal injury claims. During my years in litigation support, I've seen more than a dozen personal injury cases involving light bulbs. It's just that common a cause of injury.

It happens *all the time* for a variety of reasons, I'm afraid. If you or a loved one got an eyeful of flying glass from an exploding bulb like Teri Hatcher you might hold a more serious opinion of the problem of exploding light bulbs than believing it "only happens in the movies."

-- Bobby G.

I'm not sure I agree that it is possible, Bob. Maybe so, but IME it hasn't happened.

I've only seen the reports of flickering here. I believe those reports as all but one of the people discussing it are known to be forthright. I disagree that the product is "untested" though and I seriously doubt the flickering will cause a catastorphic failure.

Smarthome isn't responsible for unknown physical failure of the bulb. That's like saying that a maker of glass table tops is responsible for a customer getting cut when a wooden table he bought elsewhere fell apart, causing the glass to break.

I did a search and found none where the light fixture or switch was at fault. All of the hazards I found were associated with improper handling or defective bulbs, neither of which would be Smarthome's problem since they don't make light bulbs.

I read that case. There was nothing about the bulb burning out prematurely. The kid fell off the ladder.

Yep. You'll notice that I don't sell Insteon and I never sold Switchlinc stuff either. There are two reasons. First, I've never been confident in the products. Second, they don't offer much of a price break to dealers. In all fairness though, even if I thought that Insteon was wonderful I wouldn't carry it due to reason number two. :^)

Appartently they did not. It is possible that they believed that the problems only affect a small percentage of installations.

True, but I doubt that's enough to win a product liability case against them if, say am 18-year old kid disobeys his boss, climbs a ladder and falls to his death in the process.

We agree that they should not have sold it if they believed it was defective. How they should have gone about fixing the problem isn't the issue.

We're assuming they considered the defect substantial. Maybe they thought it was only a few switches or that the problem was limited to certain installations. I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.

We don't disagree that they should have at least stopped selling them or notified dealers / end users of a possible problem.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is all too common in the industry.

Probably so.

I agree. But I am not willing to say a switch could *never* blow up a bulb. It only takes one injury to get into a court dispute with serious consequences.

The Supremes nearly catch fire from a flaming filament falling to earth! Let's hope the question of whether light bulbs can explode never reaches the Supreme Court. They already know the answer!

It's one case among so many that I know about. People often don't believe how many people are injured every year from common items like light bulbs, soda bottles and pocket lighters. After you've seen the burn photos of women whose lighters ignited in their purses, time after time, you begin to realize the potential for harm. Soda bottles have blinded more people than most people realize:

The abstract titled: "Serious eye injuries caused by bottles containing carbonated drinks" reports that the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) estimated that 32,000 people were treated in emergency rooms for bottle related trauma in 1974.

It must have been a very slow year. PC Magazine long ago taught me that magazines exist to sell magazines and will gladly tout vaporware and promises - especially from big advertisers! Something tells me Smarthome buys ad space in EH.

Ah, but bulbs can be borderline bad and when coupled with a borderline bad switch end up failing where they might not have failed alone. All a jury has to find is that the contributed to the injury to put them on the legal hook for damages. I think, as I've described in my other note to James, they'll make that connection far more easily than they'll understand the true technical nature of the choke problem.

What's your best guess about how it's burning out bulbs earlier than usual? Is it just because it's no longer slowly ramping up the power supplied to the bulb and thus "shocking" the filament more than before?

-- Bobby G.

I to this day am terrified of hanging Parcans above audiences. Haven't quite figured a way around it, though. I've seen blown up Par lamps come crashing to the earth twice. Luckily no one was injured either time. FELs are even worse, but have much less glass, and are contained by the lenses in front of them.

Robert, you have way too much time on your hands coupled with a vivid imagination. Exploding light bulbs, Nasa, Big Dig. None of these things have anything to do with light flicker. Come on already.

"Robert Green" wrote in news:QeCdnQSmpaDzRVTZnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@rcn.net:

"Robert Green" wrote in news:NbednXrAY7OreVTZnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@rcn.net:

No it's not.

There is a way to protect people below. In addition to the standard C-clamp, install a steel safety cable on each lamp and another on the barn doors. Further, place a steel mesh (looks like chicken wire only much sturdier) in the filter slot on the barn doors to keep pieces larger than

3/4" diameter from falling.

With FELs the fixture itself is the hazard. Drop one on someone from 25' up and they'll probably be killed. I used to run 2" pipe for my fixtures. The pipe is secured with hardened clamps which in turn are screwed onto 1/2" x

8" lag bolts at every beam. Backup consists of 5,000 lb test chain doubled around the pipe and through bolted using 1/2" threaded rod at each beam.

I asked an engineer friend to calculate the load limit of the apparatus. He estimated it could safely hold a static load of 300 lbs per foot. This is how we ran fixtures above the audience.

Above the stage we used a grid of heavy steel C-beams, bolted and chained to the beams above every 8' in each direction. It was designed to hold live loads (moving actors suspended from ropes) up to 400 lbs per foot and static loads several times that weight.

Of course, in residential lighting systems you might not need something quite so sturdy. :^)

Dude. You haven't been reading closely enough. For the fourth or fifth time I'll repeat:. It doesn't matter if YOU or I or anyone here thinks it's possible or not, we would NEVER be seated on any jury hearing this very hypothetical case. We're too familiar with the subject matter on a number of fronts and both the judge and the attorneys would feel we could override any evidence they presented with information from outside the case. They hate outside influence so much they sequester important juries in hotels.

When you ask a jury to believe something could *never* happen, you're asking them to go against their own experience as well as memories of things like the unsinkable Titanic. There were plenty of experts who would have told you jet plane impacts could not have brought down the World Trade Center buildings. They didn't factor in the new, novel "pan" building design and the heat from a full tank of jet fuel.

When you say "can't happen" you immediately alienate a jury as being a know-it-all. Smart lawyers and experts nearly *never* talk that way. Almost nearly never. Very, very rarely. Maybe one in one hundred. :-) They talk in probabilities.

Here's how it would go between SH and opposing counsel:

"You say that a device called a choke was at fault. What does a choke do?"

(Detailed explanation of how a choke works inserted here, jury enters a coma thinking defense expert is an even more boring dweeb than their science teacher was. This is where they remember nothing more than "Millie choked Henry after he got inducted because he was not big enough to stop the noise.")

(Plaintiff's attorney drops an exhibit on the desk to break the jury out of their technotrance) "So, a choke keeps this bad thing - this noise - from going where it shouldn't?"

(Expert has to say "yes", doesn't he?)

"And you admit this choke was defective and had to be replaced?"

(Expert has to say "yes" once again)

"And you agree that the old choke was too small and it let more this "bad stuff" this "noise" pass than it should?"

(Expert has to say "yes")

"And this bad stuff, this noise that makes your own switch misbehave reached the bulb as well?"

(Expert is dying to say, "Yes, but so what? Triac noise *always* gets to the bulb - it's how you dim it" but he can't add what he hasn't been asked because it would be stricken as unresponsive so he says, once again, simply "yes" because the triac noise does, indeed, reach the bulb. A lot of what the jury gets to know is based on whether opposing counsel is smart enough to object when being led into a trap during direct examination. )

Now the jury thinks, they had a bad whozit that let evil out into the house wires! Judgement for the plaintiff!!!! This is really how lawyers connect dots that don't necessarily connect for people who really don't know the details of any of the dots.

After the dots have been laid out and connections suggested by both sides, the jury will decide the case based on which lawyer or litigant looked more like Brad Pitt. (-:

And all of the above is why I am still stunned that Smarthome would push their way onto the arena floor of the coliseum of American product liability litigation. By not suspending sales when it was clear they were having widespread problems on a number of fronts, they made themselves a sitting duck for a serious legal problem if something bad happened to any device with an unfixed Smarthome switch attached to it.

Here are some things to "doubt" about the depth of Smarthome's beta testing from someone who's been posting at Homeseer's board for 4+ years:

***************************************************** "Here are some of the things you can expect if you install Insteon Today(some already mentioned above)

1) Applianclincs frying when trying to run some loads 2) Blinking of lights when dimmed if high load attached (flicker problem) 3) Group communication that is less reliable than individual communication 4) Slooooow dowloading and adding of links (minutes per switch in some cases) 5) SDM freezing/locking up requiring restart of SDM 6) PLC locking up requiring unplugging/plugging back in 7) Poor Signallinc Range, it takes a while to find a good spot to install these 8) Unreliable communication in some places, may require extra Signallincs, x10 filters, or large number of switches installed to resolve. 9) No way to delete stale links with plugin, need to reset switches 10) Possibly lights coming on during power outages

Not everyone has experienced all of these, but I have experienced all but the last one in my 12 switch install.

******************************************************

That's not the warm, fuzzy feeling that's going to make me torture my nearly

70 year-old cloth-covered wall box pigtails and take out the old X-10 switches. Maybe three or four years from now they'll get the kinks worked out. I'll be keeping my eye on them, though. :-)

-- Bobby G.

There are still plenty that would say that:

Everyones an expert after the event and there are plenty of experts who will tell you anything you want to hear and more, but my take on it is that the WTC towers were brought down by the fires that resulted from the the planes impact, the US Navy didn't shoot down TWA 800, they really did walk on the moon, there isn't a colony of aliens living in area 51 and Jim Morrison is pushing up the daisies. Elvis however really did shoot JFK and faked his own demise when the feds were closing in and is currently flipping burgers in a Burger King in the South of France

Doug

There was no way to repair the damage in orbit even *if* the investigated it more fully and were able to determine that a re-entry attempt was out of the question. There was no way for Columbia to link up with the space station (they didn't have the fuel to perform the maneuver that would even put them in the same orbit). There was no time to prepare a second orbiter to rescue the crew before their oxygen ran out (and the possibility of similar damage occurring was just too great). The crew of the Columbia was doomed from the moment that chunk of foam came loose.

Fascinating. I had read Charlie Sheen was leading the pack, what with his background in metallurgy, engineering and building design (humma, humma!). I think people were troubled by how much the collapse looked like deliberate building demolition we've all seen on TV. It parallels some of the other comments about people's interpretation of events (can light bulbs explode) based on what they've seen elsewhere, even on TV or in the movies.

Oddly enough one of the things that troubled me the most about the collapse was how eerily it was presaged in the 1999 movie "Independence Day" which showed CGI images that looked very much like the WTC collapse to come. That's probably because they realized that without a large angular moment (such as an earthquake might cause) the building's weight will cause it to fall in on itself.

In this case, if you understand how the burning jet fuel worked, it's quite easy to understand why the building pancaked. Anyone who's ever seen an overloading shelving unit collapse (me!) knows that when you overload supports, they'll fail and, in turn, cause the supports underneath them to fail.

Why didn't the buildings "fall over" as so many conspiracy theorists think they should have? Well, there was no "sidewise" force other than the initial impact, which wasn't enough to tip them at that instant and whose swaying effect (estimates range from 6" to a foot) had been damped by the time of collapse. All the stored energy in the building is from the cranes that lifted the building material during its construction. It's all very vertically oriented and therefore, so was the collapse.

It's also interesting to note that survivability assessments *had* been done, but using smaller, lighter 707's of the time the building was built, not the much larger planes that hit. Like X-10, it worked well for the time it was developed, but the changing environment has challenged many of the underlying design assumptions of the time.

-- Bobby G.

Amen brother! I just love to hear the experts who were couldn't predict the bad event, but could explain it away just fine. Twenty-twenty hindsight.

You'd be in good company. I've watched a number of PBS and other TV specials, along with reading a number of in-depth articles about the collapse. We've even had discussions at the house with dad's civil engineering friends. They are all comfortable with the official outcome.

The novel, open space "pan" and wall-hook design of the building and supports without sufficient fire protection seem to be the cause of the collapse. Many architects feel had the planes hit a more traditionally-designed building like the Empire State Building, the steel girders and crossbeams would have survived the impact and fire.

I'm not so sure what happened to TWA 800. That's an incident with an awful lot of unanswered questions attached including why so many trained observers reported seeing something moving UP towards the plane from the ground. Still, as my physics professor used to say, if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. If there's a simple, non-conspiratorial answer, it's far more likely to be the real reason than something far more exotic - like zebras.

Damn. You've forced Elvis to have to look for a new job! (Actually, Elvis played one of his last gigs nearby and I had backstage passes - he was already looking *pretty* bad by then - it's no surprise he joined Jim Morrison in the Tower of Song.)

-- Bobby G.

First thing, I have no opinion either way. I have spent a ton of time reading all of these articles and watching the videos, and mostly have come to only one conclusion: it is fascinating.

One thing that bothers me in particular is Building 7, which was not impacted by an airplane, which showed a textbook demolition, which contained a government emergency response center, which was a block away from WTC I and II... that one bothers me a little.

The freefall math a few people have done seems to suggest the pancake theory doesn't hold water. Namely, they say that when a building pancakes, the impact of the top on each bottom floor slows down the fall of the top. IE, it happens in a sequance which hesitates a tiny bit as it hits each element of resistance.

The math done by some very smart people suggests that the top of Building 7 hits the ground at a freefall time period, meaning that the lower floors showed no resistance to the freefall whatsoever.

Then we get into things like chemists finding traces of thermite, the fact that the mechanical engineering community wanted to examine the rubble so they could design better buildins int he future but weren't allowed to, soem inconsistancies in passenger manifests on the airplanes, the near impossibility of navigating a jet liner without training in flight deck operations......

As I said, I really have no opinion. But it seems plain that there are some questions that should maybe be answered.

Personally, if there's any sort of cover-up, I think it more likely that someone is covering up our intelligence ineptitude, not some government plot to kill lots of Americans. Who knows.

I do know this: This thread sparked this discussion again between me and my coworkers during a van ride home from DC yesterday. We had been discussing it for about an hour, had fallen into silence. A car merged onto the interstate in front of us, with the license plate "WTCI&II". One of my female coworkers flipped out. She reads her horoscope daily and things like that.

It WAS a little freaky.

I'd have that van swept for bugs. ;-)

BTW, once the plane is airborne flying it into a building wouldn't take a lot of skill. These guys had taken flying lessons. I have a Private Pilot license and some years ago had the opportunity to fly the Flying Tigers (now FedEx) 747 simulator, a 9 million dollar rig that is so realistic it actually had a tail number and was considered actual time in my logbook. With only the skills of a single engine Cessna pilot, I was able to perform all the basic flight operations, i.e. take-off, pattern work and landing with no more than a one hour pre-flight briefing. Admittedly, my landings weren't "greasers" (but I didn't blow any tires either according to the computer) but the WTC terrorists weren't particularly interested in that phase of flight.

reading all of these articles and watching the videos, and mostly

And, it shows how a pretty basic set of agreed upon and excruciatingly documented facts - things we've all seen, probably dozens of times - can be seen from an amazingly wide variety of viewpoints. It's a very apt example of the phenomena I've been talking about concerning product liability. Building 7 is a great example of how facts can be interpreted pretty wildly by a random assortment of people. Even we "smart guys" can't agree on something we know so well. (-:

I agree that the cause of B7's collapse isn't as straightforward as the Twin Towers. There's a humongous page at:

That asks, among other things about the North tower collapse:

"But how? What caused the 47 enormous steel core columns of this building which supported the antenna to evidently give way nearly simultaneously, if not cutter charges?"

Statements like that bother me. The jet fuel, burning as evenly as any roaring fire I've ever seen, heated the supports uniformly. Metal gets extremely plastic when hot. Had the jets struck higher, there might not have been no collapse. But they struck low enough so that the tremendous weight of the upper floors resting on the uniformly weakened supports of the impact floors caused them to buckle and the pancaking began.

I've read that later studies have concluded, based on recovered debris, that the fire burned much hotter than originally estimate. There was a hell of a chimney effect as well as no shortage of oxygen at that height. You probably couldn't design a more efficient way of setting the building on fire in the middle. The jet delivers the payload deep into the center of the building, smashing holes in both sides to assure good cross ventilation.

Alleges to show a squib exploding but I don't see it. Some exploding tank of some gas or liquid or a part of the overall debris cloud just shot from a strange angle. If you look into the cloud, you can see the face of Beelzebub, too! :-)

But the site does raise some interesting questions and reminds us the whole truth may never be known. My pet theory is the WTC were about to be condemned so rather than face the demolition costs, someone funded a team of terrorists to do what building owners have been doing since there's been insurance. Torch it for the money! (Just a joke, please don't sue me, WTC building owner(s)!)

I wonder if the owner of record isn't a Saudi front man? Hey, when Tony Soprano needs a building torched, he keeps it in the family. OK, humorous commentary aside, back to pancaking.

What surprises me is how many people seem to believe only cutter charges can pancake buildings. The facts (as I know them) are that unless there's

*significant* sideways force, buildings *always* tend to come *straight* down just the way they were built - *straight* up.

The jet's impact caused some moderate swaying but that was damped long before the end. Even if the eastern most supports failed first, which would make you believe it would tip that way, the transmission of the load upon failure of the eastern supports would be nearly instantaneous to the other supports. Within less than few seconds, they, too would snap like twigs even if they weren't damaged. They would suddenly be carrying double their load rating, if not more and down the building would come - straight down.

That's what it *wants* to do because of inertia. Every piece of debris wants to plunge straight down to earth unless acted upon by additional forces. There's some confusion about that because some debris *is* ejected violently sideways from the bellows action of the floors squeezing together. That's why some tragically identifiable material like wallets were found blocks away. But the bulk of the heaviest matter falls straight down and is pulverized by action of the building disintegrating. Once the supports collapse, for a brief millisecond all the filecabinets, desks, chairs and furnishings try to support the fast-approaching floor above and get pulverized.

Earthquake damage is different. Buildings sway back and forth until something snaps, often near the base. The top of the building is already in motion and it stays in motion and can fall far from the base (unless the ground moves back to "catch" it, that is). Think Kobe and the images of large buildings, still intact and lying on their sides.

When Charlie Sheen first became a Building 7 "questioner" I sent an email to my dad and a civil engineering friend that outlined many of the issues raised by the collapse of Building 7. They scoffed at it, and both said they believed the building was hit by the "peel" - the skin and contents being forced explosively out of the building as each floor collapses. You can see it as a rubble cloud that hovers around the perimeter of each collapsing floor.

The surprise is *not* that #7 collapsed, but that more nearby buildings didn't. The lowest nearby building would take the greatest debris load started from the greatest height. The debris would accrete uniformly, consisting of mostly concrete and steel dust from the beginning to the end of the entire collapse of the tower.

I'd have to look again, but I think it's entirely possible that as the planes hit, a lot of jet fuel continued on past the building (it hit with a lot of sideways kinetic energy from the jet) and onto Building 7 and the street. Is Building 7 in a position to absorb that "overspray?" I can't seem to find a simple layout diagram of the buildings and the direction of impact. If it was in a position to take a bolus of jet fuel and then some flaming debris, it's subject to the same fire-induced damage that collapsed the other buildings, When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras (or cutter charges)!

You are right about it making fascinating reading!

-- Bobby G.