Virus? Circuitus Interrputus

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jebatty

Minister of Fire
Jan 1, 2008
5,796
Northern MN
A virus must have infected my Cat5e 1-wire cable run. I just finished a couple of hours of sleuthing to fix an intermittent circuit for a 1-wire sensor feeding a digital temp panel meter. Nothing seemed to solve the problem: connectors, a splice, the sensor, wiring block, temp meter. Then with a long jumper I checked continuity on the Cat5e cable itself, and the ground wire showed no continuity. There must be a break somewhere in the cable run for that conductor. Fortunately, I had an unused wire which became the new ground wire. It had worked without issue for about six months, then the intermittent problem popped up, and then today there was no reading at all -- had to be a mutated virus of some sort.
 
Some months ago I was experiencing very weird temperature readings from the collector probe in the solar setup at home. Temperature would go from the tens to the seventies to the hundred degrees Celsius, in the middle of the night or with cloudy skies and raining. Most of the time it seemed to read ok, but the odd temperature jumps would appear when you least expected them. It turned out the probe line was not long enough to reach the controller and the installer had connected to it a longer run of wire by the expeditive method of twisting both ends together and sticking some duct tape around them. It worked fine for some months, the the fun began. When I took the duct tape away the copper was blackish and rotten and very fragile. It was curious because it still worked, sort of. Only sometimes it would go crazy and make my life miserable.
 
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