Hi all. i thought id ask the question here prior to going down the support call route.
SYSTEM
Watchmon4 with 37 3volt 100ah cells.
37 x M8 Cellmons.
Shuntmon2 1000A.
Isomon.
TC/Elcon charger.
****All system is approx 4 years old
Communication to laptop works fine.
All Cellmons are blinking as normal.
Watchmon is transmitting TX ticks but not receiving RX ticks from Isomon. I have replaced the Isomon and cable - no change. System will occasionally start communicating if i disconnect & reconnect the cable from the Isomon to the Watchmon4, but it will inevitably stop communicating again after some time.
Tried Network test - just has error saying “timed out”.
Won’t device sync.
The shunt is communicating & displaying fine.
Software and firmware have been updated successfully with no change.
If there are any suggestions/help out there i would greatly appreciate the input.
In the early years with the original Watchmon I had this issue somewhat using longmons. The trouble (in my case) was the custom twisted pair wires is used to cover the 10-15ft from the battery to the Watchmon. The packs of the battery where OK using the official, un-modified longmon cabling from pack to pack but it was from the main + and - to the Watchmon where I manually twisted some wiring to bridge the 10-15ft from the battery to the Watchmon - it wasn’t good enough. Eventually I wised up and followed youtube examples where people used twisted pair wires stripped from from CAT 5 or 5E or 6 internet wire and all my issues when away.
Don’t know you’re setup but If you have some custom wiring in the loop, perhaps try some internet twisted pair wire. Also, for my Watchmon (7 yrs old with 140 longmons) and Watchmon4 (4? yrs old with 14 longmons) I skipped the IsoMon and hooked my internet twisted pair wiring directly from the longmons at the main + and - of the battery to the Watchmon / Watchmon4 terminal blocks to eliminate the IsoMon (that intermediate cable) as an issue. I did need the IsoMon3 for the more recent WatchmonCore - the IsoMon3 has actual circuitry (with a chip) to make it compatible with K9 and Longmon both whereas the old IsoMon was just a helper cable with plugs for the longmon cabeling to plug in directly.
Not urging any of this, just trying to share what I did if it helps you.
Thanks heaps for your reply and suggestion. I too have quite a distance between pack and watchmon so i did the twisted wire trick but did use the ethernet twisted pairs to set it up initially. i have tried bypassing those wires with new wire but unfortunately no change to the issue. i might try deleting the isomon and wire directly and see how that goes. Thanks again.
OK, next observation is that I’ve had 1 or 2 ‘bad connections’ at the longmon level over the 175 longmons I operate. For example, things will run (green lights flicker accross the longmons) OK till an extra humid day and will ‘freeze’. I can usually see this because the green lights stop a the bad connection longmon. In one case I replaced the longmon connecting cable. In another case I just wiggled the connection (by wiggling the wire) and things resumed.
I’m wondering if you observe a place where the green lights sort of ‘stop’ / ‘freeze’ and if so, then that might be the specific point of a bad connection or even a bad mon. And I’m also trying to express that bad connections aren’t always 100% on/off but intermittent on occasion - so maybe go thru and wiggle the connectors at each mon.
IF you zero in on a specific mon, you can rewire to skip over it and reconfigure the Watchmon from 14 to 13 (or whatever) for the purposes of trying to establish a working network and isolate the ‘bad part’. Heck, you could just start with 1 mon and see if that works then 2 and then 3, etc… and perhaps turn up the problem area that way. I know it could be tedious depending on you’re physical setup but this might help establish 1) can I do even 1 mon? - e.g. Watchmon issue or 2) can I do more than 1 mon and some are good and other bad? - e.g. focus on the bad ones in the network.